With more than 2.95 billion people now estimated to use social media, an organization's online presence directly relates to the satisfaction of its customers, as well as its profits. False or misleading images or comments connected with a brand on online platforms can swiftly impact the reputation or even financials of an otherwise successful company. While most individuals have been...

Threat actors are using the novel coronavirus to add credibility in recent Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks. Below are three examples of how they are doing it. We are providing ongoing updates on coronavirus-themed attacks observed by the PhishLabs team. This post and others are meant to help the security community stay up-to-date on how threat actors are exploiting the pandemic. ...

Threat actors are using social media to engage in money-flipping scams abusing the novel coronavirus. The two examples below demonstrate how they are doing it. We are providing ongoing updates on coronavirus-themed attacks observed by the PhishLabs team. This post and others are meant to help the security community stay up-to-date on how threat actors are exploiting the pandemic. The...

In the past few weeks, our team highlighted how social media is abused by threat actors seeking to steal credentials and to administer phishing attacks. While these are both two of the most prominent cybersecurity threats distributed through social media, there are some other tactics in play, too. Join us on February 6 to discuss the latest social media-based financial scams. This week we're...

Today's marketing organization uses countless SaaS-based tools and platforms that live outside of an organization's network. As their digital footprint grows, so does their potential for digital risks targeting their enterprise, brands, and customers. Even if they don't join the latest social media platform, in most cases there are not proper online brand protections in place to ensure...

Social media is undoubtedly a huge asset to modern organizations. It helps them spread their message, promote their products and services, and communicate directly with customers, and users. Along with those benefits, social media also presents a unique threat. Never before has it been so easy for threat actors to abuse the trust built up by an organization, damage its reputation, profit...

PhishLabs' Email Incident Response analysts recently identified a phishing campaign leveraging novel tactics in the ongoing war between threat actors and security teams. In addition to presenting a unique twist on a popular lure theme, the campaign leverages a clever combination of tactics by attackers attempting to defeat email security technologies to great effectiveness. PhishLabs observed...

Social media-based phishing attacks have taken off in a big way. According to some estimates, social media now accounts for as much as 5% of all phishing attacks globally. When you consider that phishing volume has grown consistently every year for more than a decade (up 40% last year alone), that 5% constitutes a lot of attacks. This increase is no coincidence. Social media phishing attacks...

Ambassadors of security training programs often struggle with the most effective way to drive success. The ultimate purpose of these programs is to change employee behavior and create a more secure organization. Put simply, behavior is influenced by either reinforcement (i.e., encouraging employees to perform behaviors that we like) or punishment (i.e., discouraging employees from performing...

You have carefully selected a training program. Employees are completing the courses. And yet, they are not reporting suspicious emails and their passwords are made up of favorite sports teams and graduation dates. What is missing? Research shows that implementing training alone, as good as it may be, is not enough. We have learned that the transfer of new knowledge and behaviors on-the-job is...

In honor of National Cybersecurity Awareness Month (CSAM), Dane Boyd, PhishLabs' Security Training Manager, and I will share a series of posts covering topics from cybersecurity to organizational learning and development. We are kicking off the series by covering a topic near and dear to my heart: taking a programmatic approach to implementing a security training program. A fatal flaw...

On a daily basis, around 42% of the global population, or 3.2 billion people, uses some form of social media. Of that number, people spend a daily average of 2.2 hours on these networks, too. These two numbers are exactly why threat actors continue to flock to social media to abuse them for phishing purposes; however, there is far more to this story. Phishing threats extend well beyond Twitter,...

Today, social media is a daily medium for communication for much of the modern world, and adoption only continues to grow. Because of this, much like how threat actors started to target mobile users, they have begun to abuse social media, too. While marketing teams have been known to monitor social media to protect their brand and communicate on their behalf, they are not equipped to handle...

As the manager of a security awareness team, whose primary goal is to educate users on how to spot phishing attacks, I often get asked, “can you make the phishing simulations look like real-world phish?" This is when I show people what real-world phishing attacks look like. Because our SOC analyzes millions of phishing emails each year, we have a great data set to choose from. Outside of...

Although computer-based training has been on the scene for over two decades, it is only recently that learning professionals have begun to optimize it. Often these courses present hours of content in a single learning experience. While the flexibility of computer-based training offers convenience, learners are often overloaded and overwhelmed by the amount of information presented to them. ...

In the cyber security world, few research reports are more widely respected than Verizon's annual Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). The DBIR—which is based on data from publicly disclosed security incidents, Verizon's Threat Research Advisory Center, and dozens of industry contributors—is one of the most detailed and comprehensive reports available to the security community. So when...

The risk of a user receiving a phishing attack is higher than ever, and technological solutions often miss the most devastating of them. Though technology is both an important and required component in protecting the enterprise, security teams need to remain vigilant and educated on quickly identifying threats which make it past technology. This includes the latest social engineering...