Security News
Nuspire released a report, outlining new cybercriminal activity and tactics, techniques and procedures throughout Q3 2020, with additional insight from Recorded Future. Malware campaigns, like Emotet, utilized these events as phishing lure themes to assist in delivery.
A new email tool advertised on a cybercriminal forum provides a stealthier method for carrying out fraud or malware attacks by allowing messages to be injected directly into the victim's inbox. Called "Email Appender," the tool can enable more sophisticated phishing and business email compromise attacks as well as help the less technical actors in the ransomware business.
The number of phishing incidents in 2020 is now set to increase 15% year-on-year, though this could soon change as second waves of the pandemic spread. The three primary objectives for COVID-19-related phishing emails were identified as fraudulent donations to fake charities, credential harvesting and malware delivery. "The risk of being phished is higher than ever and fraudsters are increasingly using digital certificates to make their sites appear genuine," said David Warburton, Senior Threat Evangelist at F5 Labs.
As COVID-19 continues to threaten the world, these types of attacks are expected to persist, according to cyber threat intelligence provider Check Point Research. In a report released Tuesday titled Securing the 'next normal, Check Point discussed its 2021 predictions in the face of the pandemic.
Microsoft is working on adding a new Microsoft Forms phishing attempt review feature that will allow Office 365 admins to confirm and block forms that try to maliciously harvest sensitive data. Phishing attempts are detected by Microsoft Forms with the help of proactive phishing detection, a protection feature that will proactively identify malicious password collection in forms and surveys.
A social housing provider in Norwich, England, has said it was hit with the Sodinokibi ransomware following what it assumes was a successful phishing attack. "Whilst the investigation is still going on we can confirm that the incident was caused by ransomware, known as Sodinokibi, via a suspected phishing attack," said Flagship in a statement on its partially pwned website.
Abstract: Phishing scam emails are emails that pretend to be something they are not in order to get the recipient of the email to undertake some action they normally would not. While technical protections against phishing reduce the number of phishing emails received, they are not perfect and phishing remains one of the largest sources of security risk in technology and communication systems.
The Qbot botnet is now spewing U.S. election-themed phishing emails used to infect victims with malicious payloads designed to harvest user data and emails for use in future campaigns. "In addition to stealing and exfiltrating data from its victims, QBot will also start grabbing emails that will later be used as part of the next malspam campaigns," Malwarebytes' Jérôme Segura and Hossein Jazi explain.
A creative Office 365 phishing campaign has been inverting images used as backgrounds for landing pages to avoid getting flagged as malicious by crawlers designed to spot phishing sites. This tactic has been used by several Office 365 credential phishing sites according to WMC Global analysts who spotted while being deployed as part of the same phishing kit created and sold by a single threat actor to multiple users.
For attackers, it's almost a no-brainer: phishing is cheap and humans are fallible, even after going through anti-phishing training. That's why defenders must preempt attacks, he says, and reinforce a lesson during a live attack.