Security News > 2020

Both the overall number of complaints and the total reported financial losses went up compared to 2018, when IC3 received 351,937 complaints, for a total of $2.7 billion reported losses. The total losses from reported Internet crime over the past five years has surpassed $10.2 billion and the IC3 received a total of 1,707,618 complaints during this period, at an average of more than 340,000 complaints per year.

Time for a fresh edition of "Learn from how others get breached" focusing on Equifax. If there's one thing that every organization should learn from the Equifax breach, it's about patching.

Since the launch of the Hack the Pentagon program in 2016, bug bounty programs continue to increase in popularity - however, as more programs are created, some companies are forgetting the real reason behind bug bounties. Instead of aiming to make their systems more secure, companies are viewing bug bounty programs as a "One size fits all" solution for their business.

The agency that leads counterintelligence efforts for the U.S. has listed five key priorities for the year ahead that go far beyond protecting government secrets. In documents published by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Monday, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center notes that its priorities for 2020 are: protecting critical infrastructure; reducing threats to U.S. supply chains; guarding against the theft of corporation's intellectual property; battling against influence campaigns aimed at undermining democracy; and guarding against the use of new technologies, such as 5G and the internet of things, for spying.

More than 15.1 billion records were exposed in 2019 as part of the data breaches that were publicly reported, Risk Based Security reveals. There were "Three breaches that compromised 1 billion records or more exposed transaction logs," but the number of impacted people is much lower than the 7.6 billion exposed records.

While the IR process is mostly technical, reporting to the organization's management should take place on a much higher level in order for the non-security -savvy executives to understand. To assist CISOs with these tasks, Cynet created the IR Management and Reporting PowerPoint template which apart from providing an actionable response framework, is also clear and intuitive for the executive level.

Businesses and individuals lost $3.5 billion to cybercriminals last year while reporting more incidents of internet crime to the FBI than any year previously, according to the bureau's Internet Core Competency Certification 2019 Internet Crime Report, which was released on Tuesday. People reported 467,361 complaints of cybercrime to the FBI in 2019-an average of nearly 1,300 incidents every day, and more than 100,000 more than the year prior, according to the report.

Business email compromise and email account compromise scams are still the most lucrative schemes for cybercriminals: the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center has calculated that, in 2019, the average monetary loss per BEC/EAC scam complaint reached $75,000. During the past year, the IC3 received a total of 467,361 cybercrime complaints with reported losses exceeding $3.5 billion, and $1.77 billion of those are the result of BEC/EAC. For comparison, BEC/EAC-associated losses were $1.3 billion in 2018, $676 million in 2017 and $360 million in 2016.

To assist CISOs with these tasks, Cynet created the IR Management and Reporting PowerPoint template, which apart from providing an actionable response framework, is also clear and intuitive for the executive level. IR Reporting To turn the security process more digestible for management, the template focuses on two key themes - actions taken to control the incident and continuous insights into its root cause and scope.

KBOT, a piece of malware that has been infecting computers for the past year, has been classified by Kaspersky as a "Living virus," a class of malware thought to be extinct. The cybersecurity firm told SecurityWeek that it has already detected 1,880 unique files infected by KBOT in 2020.