Phishing has and will continue to be a threat to anyone connected to the web. This is a fact set in stone, and regardless of advancements in technology, social engineering will allow these attacks to continue to be successful. Today, we are releasing our latest version of the annual Phishing Trends and Intelligence report. Using data collected from millions of social engineering attacks...

Recently, our Director of Product Management, Cary Hudgins, discussed how to develop a digital risk protection plan for the modern enterprise. One of the many reasons why such a plan should be created is because, in today's world, an enterprise organization's digital footprint can be vast and will continue to grow. Take for example the average employee who receives an average of 90 emails per...

Taking Advantage of Our Tendency to Simplify There's an old joke floating around the Internet that claims NASA, upon discovering that standard ballpoint pens would not work in space, invested millions of dollars and years of R&D. The resulting pen was supposedly capable of writing in zero-G, on any surface, and in temperatures that would surely kill any astronaut. When confronted with the same...

In May of 2018, we reported on three Romanian threat actors who were extradited to the U.S. for their involvement in a SMiShing and Vishing fraud scheme. At the time of reporting, the expected losses were listed around $18 million but have since risen to more than $21 million. Between July 12 and October 31, 2011, PhishLabs' analysts detected a number of telephone phishing (known as vishing)...

It's time to take action against phish! Phishing attacks are no longer few and far between, they are the norm. Regardless of your company's investments in filtering technologies and countermeasures, suspicious and malicious emails make it into employee inboxes. It only takes one to cost your company time, money, and lost reputation. Unfortunately, even with traditional security awareness...

We've previously reported on how, due to the rise in phishing attempts leveraging SSL certificates, the icon in your web browser gives your users a false sense of security. The threat, however, doesn't end with your web browser. Although first observed as early as 2016, PhishLabs analysts have observed a dramatic uptick in the imitation of flags, banners, and other markup used by applications...

You are affected by social engineering tactics every day. Okay, let me explain. From an information security standpoint, Wikipedia says that social engineering is the psychological manipulation of people into performing actions or divulging confidential information[1]. That's true, but social engineering isn't limited to information security; it's something we all experience, every day. In...

Phishing attacks are supposed to be visible. If you can't see them, how could anyone possibly fall for them? Since the dawning of time for phishing attacks there has been a constant struggle between the threat actors creating phishing sites and the individuals and organizations combating them. This has caused phishing attacks to evolve in to more complicated and stealthy traps over time....

Healthcare data breaches are among the most costly of any industry, and phishing attacks are the number one cause. Security technologies, while essential, are not enough to mitigate the threat posed by phishing. Over 90 percent of data breaches contain a phishing component, and the average cost to remediate a data breach is $3.86 million. However, the silver lining is that with an effective...

We've recently noticed two significant changes in C2 tactics used by the threat actors behind BankBot Anubis, a mobile banking trojan. First is the use of Chinese characters to encode the C2 strings (in addition to base64 encoding). The second is the use of Telegram Messenger in addition to Twitter for communicating C2 URLs. Previously reported by PhishLabs, the criminals behind BankBot...

This month the largest recorded data dump in history, 87GB filled with passwords and user credentials, was made available. Dubbed Collection #1 consists of 1,160,253,228 unique combinations of email addresses and passwords. Though historic, there are two positive notes regarding this information: The first is that this data set was circulated on hacking forums back in December of 2018 and is...

It happens on a daily basis, it's even likely that at some point it happened to you: social media account takeovers. A quick Google search shows a new batch of celebrities, politicians, companies, and other high profile users becoming the victim of account takeovers on a weekly basis. It's concerning, it can cause a ruckus, and depending on what happened after the fact it can even cause damage...

Phishing simulations come with a range of emotions for the users who interact with them. Some will simply ignore them, others may fail by clicking on a link or attachment, and for the well-trained, they may even report them. Even if there is a negative outcome, training leads and organizations should not be worried, yet. Just like in school, these simulations are just that, simulations or...

Since September 21, PhishLabs analysts have detected a number of phishing sites hosted on emoji domains. So far, all detected sites have a few things in common: They are hosted on the .WS Top Level Domain (TLD) They utilize domains with numerous subdomains (also emojis) They make use of redirects to avoid detection At the time of writing, PhishLabs analysts are investigating active...

There are many misconceptions about the dark web and what goes on in the digital underground. Though the dark web is usually associated with criminal activities including drug dealing, human trafficking, selling counterfeit consumer goods and many other malicious acts, not everything in the dark web is completely dark. Many questions are frequently asked about the dark web and to further...

The most likely way that you will be compromised online is through a simple phish or a socially engineered attack. Today, these two techniques are often combined to create an even more threatening attack, an intelligently targeted phish. Thanks to the wealth of information that we all leave behind us as we use the Internet, it is easier than ever for a social engineer to learn our name,...

Exposing your geolocation information publicly can lead to increased personal and business risk. This is particularly important to note in the wake of Google's location tracking, even if you explicitly told them not to. It is remarkable how freely we tell the world one of the most important things about ourselves: where we are. The everyday use of geotagging and geolocation data has enabled many...

In the Oscar-winning movie The Sting, Harry Gondorff (played by Paul Newman) explains to his apprentice Johnny Hooker (Robert Redford) that the con that they set up must be so convincing that their mark, Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw) won't even realize that he's been taken. Today, Gondorff and Hooker might not have needed to use a past-posting scheme to con Lonnegan. Instead they might have...