anti-phishing techniques | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers today highlighted an evasive phishing technique that attackers are exploiting in the wild to target visitors of several sites with a quirk in domain names, and leverage modified favicons to inject e-skimmers and steal payment card information covertly. "The idea is simple and consists of using characters that look the same in order to dupe users," Malwarebytes researchers said in a Thursday analysis . "Sometimes the characters are from a different language set or simply capitalizing the letter 'i' to make it appear like a lowercase 'l'." Called an internationalized domain name (IDN) homograph attack , the technique has been used by a Magecart group on multiple domains to load the popular Inter skimming kit hidden inside a favicon file . The visual trickery typically involves leveraging the similarities of character scripts to create and register fraudulent domains of existing ones to deceive unsuspecting users into...

Google Chrome browser's new Anti-Phishing Password Alert extension is in controversies right after its launch last Wednesday, but now the search engine giant has effectively pulled off Password Alert from its store. Password Alert was not bypassed once, twice, but every time Google introduced a new updated version of the extension. Google developed this Password Alert Chrome extension in an effort to alert Internet users whenever they accidentally enter their Google password on a carefully crafted phishing website that aimed at hijacking users' account. Here's the worst part: However, the first version of Password Alert was bypassed in less than 24 hours of its launch.  Security expert Paul Moore from UK-based Urity Group quickly circumvented the Anti-Phishing technology by pure JavaScript code of seven lines. Since then Google released Password Alert version 1.4, version 1.5 and version 1.6, but… ...all of them were bypassed, keeping users unaw...

In cybersecurity, confidence is a double-edged sword. Organizations often operate under a false sense of security , believing that patched vulnerabilities, up-to-date tools, polished dashboards, and glowing risk scores guarantee safety. The reality is a bit of a different story. In the real world, checking the right boxes doesn't equal being secure. As Sun Tzu warned, "Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat." Two and a half millennia later, the concept still holds: your organization's cybersecurity defenses must be strategically validated under real-world conditions to ensure your business's very survival. Today, more than ever, you need Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) , the essential strategy that's still missing from most security frameworks. The Danger of False Confidence Conventional wisdom suggests that if you've patched known bugs, deployed a stack of well-regarded security tools, and passed the nec...