email scams | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A prolific hacker who carried out phishing scams against hundreds of companies worldwide has been ordered to pay back more than $1.1 million (over £922,000) worth of cryptocurrencies to his victims. Grant West , a 27-year-old resident of Kent, England, targeted several well-known companies around the world since 2015 to obtain the financial data of tens of thousands of customers and then sold that data on underground forums in exchange for Bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies. West, who operated under the online moniker of 'Courvoisier,' stashed the resulting cryptocurrencies in multiple accounts and wallets, which was confiscated by the Metropolitan police after West's arrest in September 2017 following a two-year-long investigation code-named ' Operation Draba .' Metropolitan Police Cyber Crime Unit (MPCCU) also seized an SD card from West's home, which contained approximately 78 million individual usernames and passwords as well as 63,000 credit and de...

Security researchers have been warning about a simple technique that cyber criminals and email scammers are using in the wild to bypass most AI-powered phishing detection mechanisms implemented by widely used email services and web security scanners. Dubbed ZeroFont , the technique involves inserting hidden words with a font size of zero within the actual content of a phishing email, keeping its visual appearance same, but at the same time, making it non-malicious in the eyes of email security scanners. According to cloud security company Avanan , Microsoft Office 365 also fails to detect such emails as malicious crafted using ZeroFont technique. Like Microsoft Office 365, many emails and web security services use natural language processing and other artificial intelligence-based machine learning techniques to identify malicious or phishing emails faster. The technology helps security companies to analyze, understand and derive meaning from unstructured text embedded in an...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

The United States Department of Justice announced Monday the arrest of 74 email fraudsters across three continents in a global crackdown on a large-scale business email compromise (BEC) scheme. The arrest was the result of a six-month-long operation dubbed " Operation Wire Wire " that involved the US Department of Justice, the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Treasury, and the US Postal Inspection Service. The international law enforcement authorities led by the FBI arrested 42 of the total 74 individuals involved in BEC scheme in the United States, 29 in Nigeria and 3 each in Canada, Mauritius, and Poland. "Foreign citizens perpetrate many BEC scams. Those individuals are often members of transnational criminal organizations, which originated in Nigeria but have spread throughout the world," the DoJ says. Moreover, the authorities seized nearly $2.4 million and recovered about $14 million in fraudulent transfers, according to the FBI, which estima...