Security News
Rapper Fontrell Antonio Baines, who goes by the stage name "Nuke Bizzle," made his first appearance in U.S. District Court in downtown Los Angeles on Friday after being charged with fraudulently applying for more than $1.2 million in jobless benefits under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Central District of California. Authorities were tipped off to the scheme after Baines posted a music video on YouTube and Instagram titled "EDD," an apparent reference to the state unemployment agency.
We do a show on Facebook every week in our Naked Security Live video series, where we discuss one of the big security concerns of the week. For those of you who [a] don't use Facebook, [b] had buffering problems while we were live, [c] would like subtitles, or [d] simply want to catch up later, we also upload the recorded videos to our YouTube channel.
Cybercriminals are exploiting a $100 million Facebook grant program designed for small businesses impacted by the pandemic, to phish personal information and take over Facebook accounts. They pointed out that there is in fact, a real CNBC article about coronavirus-related Facebook grants, but the legitimate program is for small businesses, not individuals.
Naked Security Live - here's the recorded version of our latest video. Enjoy.
Sadly what works for legitimate businesses almost always works for cybercriminals too, so there are plenty of crooks still using SMSes for phishing - an attack that's wryly known as smishing. Your phone's operating system will happily recognise when the text in an SMS looks like a URL and automatically make it clickable for you.
A mobile phishing campaign is spreading via text messages purporting to come from an Apple chatbot - and offering "Free trials" of iPhone 12. Clicking the link triggers an interaction - via multiple texts - with a supposed "Apple chatbot."
A man from India has pleaded guilty to his role in a scheme that tried to embezzle about $600,000 from seven people over the age of 65 in the U.S., federal prosecutors say. Chirag Sachdeva, 30, participated in a telemarketing scheme that offered victims computer protection services after misleading them to believe that malware had been detected on their computers, according to a statement from the U.S. attorney's office in Rhode Island.
The V in vishing stands for voice, and it's a way of referring to scams that arrive by telephone in the form of voice calls, rather than as electronic messages. We can't tell whether this is just one group of crooks who are focusing on both vishing and the UK at the moment, or if it's a broader global trend, but we are experiencing unwanted vishing calls at a much greater rate than any time in the past few years.
The Sharepoint link you're expected to click to access the One Note file does look suspicious because there's no clear connection between the sender's company and the location of the One Note lure. It's only at this stage that the crooks present their call-to-action link - the click that they didn't want to put directly ino the original email, where it would have stood out more obviously as a phishing scam.
A British citizen has been extradited to the US to face charges he oversaw a series of business email compromise attacks to steal over $2m from unwary accounts departments and individuals. It is said the crew used combinations of stolen personal information, spoofed phone numbers, fake email accounts, and even voice-altering software to contact bank staff and con them into handing over control of accounts by posing as legit customers.