BEC Attack | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A coordinated law enforcement operation has resulted in the arrest of 11 members allegedly belonging to a Nigerian cybercrime gang notorious for perpetrating business email compromise (BEC) attacks targeting more than 50,000 victims in recent years. The disruption of the BEC network is the result of a ten-day investigation dubbed  Operation Falcon II  undertaken by the Interpol along with participation from the Nigeria Police Force's Cybercrime Police Unit in December 2021. Cybersecurity firms  Group-IB  and Palo Alto Networks'  Unit 42 , both of which shared information on the threat actors and their infrastructure, said six of the 11 suspects are believed to be a part of a prolific group of Nigerian cyber actors known as SilverTerrier (aka TMT). BEC attacks, which began to gain dominance in 2013, are  sophisticated scams  that target legitimate business email accounts through social engineering schemes to infiltrate corporate networks and subseq...

Business email compromise (BEC) refers to all types of email attacks that do not have payloads. Although there are numerous types, there are essentially two main mechanisms through which attackers penetrate organizations utilizing BEC techniques, spoofing and account take-over attacks. In a recent  study , 71% of organizations acknowledged they had seen a business email compromise (BEC) attack during the past year. Forty-three percent of organizations experienced a security incident in the last 12 months, with 35% stating that BEC/phishing attacks account for more than 50% of the incidents. The  FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center  (IC3) reports that BEC scams were the most expensive of cyberattacks in 2020, with 19,369 complaints and adjusted losses of approximately $1.8 billion. Recent BEC attacks include spoofing attacks on Shark Tank Host Barbara Corcoran, who lost  $380,000 ; the Puerto Rican government attacks that amounted to $4 million, and Japanese medi...

The latest Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 Cloud Threat Report found that sensitive data is found in 66% of cloud storage buckets. This data is vulnerable to ransomware attacks. The SANS Institute recently reported that these attacks can be performed by abusing the cloud provider's storage security controls and default settings. "In just the past few months, I have witnessed two different methods for executing a ransomware attack using nothing but legitimate cloud security features," warns Brandon Evans, security consultant and SANS Certified Instructor. Halcyon disclosed an attack campaign that leveraged one of Amazon S3's native encryption mechanisms, SSE-C, to encrypt each of the target buckets. A few months prior, security consultant Chris Farris demonstrated how attackers could perform a similar attack using a different AWS security feature, KMS keys with external key material, using simple scripts generated by ChatGPT. "Clearly, this topic is top-of-mind for both threat actors and ...