Security News

Britain's data watchdog has slapped construction business Interserve Group with a potential £4.4 million fine after a successful phishing attack by criminals exposed the personal data of up to 113,000 employees. The Information Commissioner's Office said the Berkshire-based company failed to exercise good security hygiene, missing alerts and more, and so was deemed to have broken data protection laws.

DHL is the most spoofed brand when it comes to phishing emails, according to Check Point. Crooks most frequently used the brand name in their attempts to steal personal and payment information from marks between July and September 2022, with the shipping giant accounting for 22 percent of all worldwide phishing attempts intercepted by the cybersecurity outfit.

PhishLabs by HelpSystems has identified attackers leveraging a weakness in Google's ad service to carry out phishing campaigns on financial institutions. In this Help Net Security video, Kevin Cryan, Director of Operational Intelligence at PhishLabs, talks about how this type of attack is different from the one identified by Microsoft - threat actors use conditional geolocation logic to present the legitimate landing page when Google scans their ad. Google publishes the ad and displays the legitimate landing URL on hover.

Panic over the risk of deepfake scams is completely overblown, according to a senior security adviser for UK-based infosec company Sophos. "The thing with deepfakes is that we aren't seeing a lot of it," Sophos researcher John Shier told El Reg last week.

Election workers in US battleground states have been hit by a surge in phishing and malware-laced emails in the run up to their primaries and the upcoming 2022 midterm elections. That's according to Trellix security researchers, who said malicious emails sent to Arizona county election workers rose 78 percent, from 617 to 1,101, between the first and second quarter of the year, ahead of the state's August 2 primary.

Credential phishing attacks continue to exploit COVID-19 to target businesses. Since early 2020, the coronavirus pandemic has given cyber criminals another area that's ripe for exploitation as they try to trick individuals and businesses into divulging sensitive information.

In the latest attacks, phishing emails impersonate the U.S. Small Business Administration and abuse Google Forms to host phishing pages that steal the personal details of business owners. The lures used in the phishing emails are for pandemic financial support programs like the "Paycheck Protection Program", "Revitalization Fund", and "COVID Economic Injury Disaster Loan.".

The operators behind the BazaCall call back phishing method have continued to evolve with updated social engineering tactics to deploy malware on targeted networks. Primary targets of the latest attack waves include the U.S., Canada, China, India, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, and the U.K. BazaCall, also called BazarCall, first gained popularity in 2020 for its novel approach of distributing the BazarBackdoor malware by manipulating potential victims into calling a phone number specified in decoy email messages.

"This platform has an intuitive interface and comes at a relatively low cost while providing a multitude of features and tools to its criminal clients to orchestrate and automate core elements of their phishing campaigns," Mandiant said in a new report. Some of the core features offered by the platform comprise the ability to craft customized phishing kits, manage redirect pages, dynamically generate URLs that host the payloads, and track the success of the campaigns.

Phishing attacks have only grown with the rise of SaaS in the workplace, and even the most security-savvy worker can be duped into a phishing attack. The turnkey platform allowed users to customise campaigns and create their own phishing tactics, providing them with over 100 phishing templates that copied known brand and services guidelines, kits, hosting and other tools.