If you have ever worked for an organization that uses Microsoft-based systems, there is a high likelihood that your IT or security team has implemented a policy that occasionally forces you to create a new password. Years ago it was every three months, then every two, and so on. This policy was heavily encouraged by Microsoft, but as of May of this year, they have reversed course. According to...

In this year's annual Phishing Trends and Intelligence report we identified phishing sites targeting more than 1,200 different brands belonging to 773 parent institutions. Of the top five targeted industries, they accounted for 83.9% of total phishing volume. There are two big takeaways from this finding: financial institutions are back on top, and each industry is still at risk. Through our...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Reported phishing emails are useful for plenty of reasons. They help you measure cyber risk, study common attack trends, and even provide inspiration for your own phishing simulations. One of the security functions that benefit most from reported phishing emails is threat hunting, the process of identifying threats quickly so they can be contained before any major damage is done. Reported...

Ransomware. The word strikes fear into the hearts of hospital administrators, local government officers, and small business owners everywhere. After exploding in 2016, ransomware has been covered extensively by media outlets and security experts, to the point where most organizations have started to take at least some action to mitigate their exposure. But have these efforts had any impact?...