Security News
Ukraine's Computer Emergency Response Team is warning of the mass distribution of Jester Stealer malware via phishing emails using warnings of impending chemical attacks to scare recipients into opening attachments. Ukrainians live under this constant fear, so these phishing emails pretend to be warnings of chemical attacks to ensure that recipients won't ignore their messages.
An increase in employee training and improved general awareness of cybersecurity has forced cybercriminals to change their tactics and take a more personal approach, known as spear phishing. To stay in front of new phishing attack techniques, it's also essential that employees are equipped with all the knowledge they need to spot a potential phishing attack that goes undetected, including how attack content differs from legitimate emails.
A phishing operation compromised over one hundred UK National Health Service employees' Microsoft Exchange email accounts for credential harvesting purposes, according to email security shop Inky. During the phishing campaign, which began in October 2021 and spiked in March 2022, the email security firm detected 1,157 phishing emails originating from NHSMail accounts that belonged to 139 NHS employees in England and Scotland.
Phishing actors abuse Google's SMTP relay service to bypass email security products and successfully deliver malicious emails to targeted users. According to a report from email security firm Avanan, there has been a sudden uptick in threat actors abusing Google's SMTP relay service starting in April 2022.
The U.S. Department of Justice has announced the conviction of Sercan Oyuntur, 40, resident of California, for multiple counts relating to a phishing operation that caused $23.5 million in damages to the U.S. Department of Defense. After an eight-day trial in Camden, California, Oyuntur was found guilty of conspiracy to commit wire, mail, and bank fraud, unauthorized device access, aggravated identity theft, and making false statements to federal law enforcement officers.
Cybercriminals are leveraging advanced tactics in their phishing-kits granting them a high delivery success rate of spoofed e-mails which contain malicious attachments right before the end of the 2021 IRS income tax return deadline in the U.S. April 18th, 2022 - there was a notable campaign detected which leveraged phishing e-mails impersonating the IRS, and in particular one of the industry vendors who provide solutions to government agencies which including e-mailing, digital communications management, and the content delivery system which informs citizens about various updates. The IT services vendor actors impersonated is widely used by major federal agencies, including the DHS, and other such WEB-sites of States and Cities in the U.S. The identified phishing e-mail warned the victims about overdue payments to the IRS, which should then be paid via PayPal, the e-mail contained an HTML attachment imitating an electronic invoice.
A previously unknown and financially motivated hacking group is impersonating a Russian agency in a phishing campaign targeting entities in Eastern European countries. The phishing emails pretend to come from the Russian Government's Federal Bailiffs Service and are written in the Russian language, with the recipients being telecommunication service providers and industrial firms in Lithuania, Estonia, and Russia.
That's not so much because you'd stand out as a scammer, but simply that your email would advertise itself as "Clearly does not belong here", or as "Obviously sent to the wrong person", and we'd ignore it even if you were a legitimate business. If we were a smaller company, and we'd outsourced our IT and email services, this sort of message might not so obviously be out of place.
SMS phishing attacks - annoyingly called "Smishing" - are becoming more common. I know that I have been receiving a lot of phishing SMS messages over the past few months.
This year's report showed dramatic 29% growth in overall phishing attacks compared to previous years, with retail and wholesale companies bearing the brunt of the increase. "Phishing attacks are impacting businesses and consumers with alarming frequency, complexity, and scope - with the rise in phishing-as-a-service making it easier than ever for non-sophisticated actors to launch successful attacks. Our annual report highlights how cybercriminals continue to escalate their usage of phishing as a starting point to breach organizations to deliver ransomware or steal sensitive data," said Deepen Desai, CISO and VP of Security Research and Operations at Zscaler.