Is your organisation ready to tackle the new challenge of QR code phishing, also known as quishing? In this TechNewsWorld article, Dr. Steve Jeffery discusses the latest carrier of choice for payloads via email.

Executive impersonation on social media is at an all-time high as threat actors take advantage of AI to improve and scale their attacks. In Q3, accounts pretending to belong to high-ranking executives on social media climbed to more than 54% of total impersonation volume, surpassing brand attacks for the first time since Fortra began tracking this data. The volume and composition of these attacks...

It’s not news that most enterprises operate in the cloud. Migration to the cloud leads to better collaboration, data storage, and lower costs compared to on-premises resources. Odds are your organization is currently enjoying the conveniences of the cloud. The cloud has reshaped the way organizations operate, but with the migration comes new obstacles in email security, and the cloud has its own...

QR phishing is currently considered a high priority risk capable of bypassing existing security controls, according to the latest article from Cyber Security Intelligence. QR Phishing, otherwise known as Quishing, is an extension of phishing attacks that is gaining popularity among threat actors who understand many email systems have difficulty reading the contents of the code. Similar to...

Threat Background & History Beginning in the first half of 2022, Fortra has monitored a significant ongoing upward trend in fraud activity originating from various Phishing-as-a-Service (PhaaS) operations. Some of these services have thrived, while the popularity of others has diminished. One PhaaS operation that has notably been present throughout the past two years is known as Strox (aka Strox...

One of our Digital Risk Protection service customers, LastPass, is committed to monitoring the cyber threat environment to keep our customers as secure as possible. To highlight this commitment, we want to call attention to recent joint efforts to disrupt a phishing campaign targeting LastPass customers and associates that began two weeks ago. We are sharing this with you not because it is a new...

Fortra’s PhishLabs has identified two separate incidents of new Google top-level domain (TLD) .zip used in phishing attacks. The attacks, detailed in the September issue of Cyber Defense Magazine, use .zip to impersonate a social media conglomerate and global technology company. Look-alike domains using common file extensions are increasingly used to enhance the perceived legitimacy of cyber...

Banks were targeted on social media more in Q2, after the largest spike in activity since 2021, according to Fortra’s PhishLabs. While cybercriminal focus on financial institutions remains high, the average number of social media attacks per business, per month in 2023 is trending lower than in 2022. In Q2 specifically, businesses experienced nearly 18 fewer attacks on social channels on average...

In Q2, phishing attacks targeting social media platforms increased more than 23%, according to Fortra’s PhishLabs. This is the greatest volume of attacks on social media in two years and puts the industry ahead of historically top targeted financial institutions. Every quarter, Fortra’s PhishLabs examines hundreds of thousands of phishing attacks targeting enterprises and their brands. In this...

The latest Verizon Data Breach Investigations report indicates that over 70% of data breaches involved the human element. Cybercriminals exploit people to trick them into clicking unsafe links, opening malicious attachments, entering their credentials into bogus login pages, sharing sensitive data, and authorizing fraudulent fund transfers. One area where many exploits take place is on social...

Because email remains the most ubiquitous form of business communication, it continues to be a favorite attack vector for cybercriminals. Email has always been vulnerable because it was not originally designed with security or privacy in mind. As a result, email security vendors emerged to protect this critical communication channel. In the early days, many vendors used signature or reputation...

While there are an estimated 30,000 daily cyber attacks on business websites, there are roughly ten times as many attacks against social media accounts every single day, equating to roughly 1.4 billion accounts every month. Social media attacks and scams have become pervasive problems, with threat actors finding innovative new ways to deceive users and steal their information. While social media...

The US healthcare sector continues to be aggressively targeted by ransomware operators. Royal and BlackCat are two of the more recent – and highly sophisticated – ransomware threats. These two new flavors of ransomware pose serious potential impacts on the healthcare sector, but there are appropriate mitigation and defense strategies that organizations can take to protect against them. What is...

Social media attacks targeting businesses have jumped 12.2% in Q1 from the previous quarter, according to Fortra’s PhishLabs. Attacks on social channels are also trending higher than Q1 2022, with the average business experiencing more than 81 attacks per month. External platforms, such as social media, are widely used by cybercriminals to engage in fraud and distribute misinformation. Threatening...

Email impersonation is the fastest growing and most successful means of bypassing email security controls. In Q4 2022, the response-based and credential theft attacks that make up email impersonation reached their highest percentage of share of all email threat volume, contributing to more than 97% of attacks reported by end users. In this series, we look at the top email impersonation threats...

Business email compromise (BEC) is a dangerous type of email spoofing that targets businesses, aiming to damage them in some way. Overall, BEC “is one of the most financially damaging online crimes,” according to a joint Cybersecurity Advisory by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Food and Drug Administration Office of Criminal Investigations (FDA OCI), and the US Department of...

Ransomware and phishing are usually put in two separate categories when cyberattack methodologies are discussed. However, ransomware operators are increasingly leveraging phishing tactics to deploy their malicious payloads, and the potential for compromise is exponentiating as a result. Ransomware and Phishing - a match made in heaven Phishing is the number one delivery vehicle for ransomware,...

Social media attacks targeting organizations closed out 2022 nearly 19% higher than Q4 of 2021, according to Fortra’s PhishLabs. Social platforms continue to act as a hotbed for malicious activity, leaving organizations of all sizes vulnerable to impersonation and abuse. As of Q4, businesses can expect an average of 72.54 attacks on social media per month. PhishLabs analyzes hundreds of...

Phishing sites impersonating reputable organizations continue to represent the top online threat to businesses and their brands. In Q4, Financial Institutions were targeted most by credential theft phish, experiencing the largest share of malicious sites recorded since 2021, according to Fortra’s PhishLabs. Within the group, criminals capitalized on the broad customer bases and recognizable names...