Search results for phishing | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Sometimes, it turns out that the answers we struggled so hard to find were sitting right in front of us for so long that we somehow overlooked them. When the Department of Homeland Security, through the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), in coordination with the FBI, issues a cybersecurity warning and prescribes specific action, it's a pretty good idea to at least read the joint advisory. In their advisory AA24-242A, DHS/CISA and the FBI told the entire cybercriminal-stopping world that to stop ransomware attacks, organizations needed to implement phishing-resistant MFA and ditch SMS-based OTP MFA.  The Best Advice I Never Followed  This year, we have experienced an astonishing surge in ransomware payments, with the average payment increasing by a staggering 500%. Per the "State of Ransomware 2024" report from cybersecurity leader Sophos, the average ransom has jumped by 5X reaching $2 million from $400,000 last year. Even more troubling, RISK &...

More than 140,000 phishing websites have been found linked to a phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform named Sniper Dz over the past year, indicating that it's being used by a large number of cybercriminals to conduct credential theft. "For prospective phishers, Sniper Dz offers an online admin panel with a catalog of phishing pages," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers Shehroze Farooqi, Howard Tong, and Alex Starov said in a technical report. "Phishers can either host these phishing pages on Sniper Dz-owned infrastructure or download Sniper Dz phishing templates to host on their own servers." Perhaps what makes it even more lucrative is that these services are provided for free. That said, the credentials harvested using the phishing sites are also exfiltrated to the operators of the PhaaS platform, a technique that Microsoft calls double theft . PhaaS platforms have become an increasingly common way for aspiring threat actors to enter the world of cy...

Phishing attacks are steadily becoming more sophisticated, with cybercriminals investing in new ways of deceiving victims into revealing sensitive information or installing malicious software. One of the latest trends in phishing is the use of QR codes, CAPTCHAs, and steganography. See how they are carried out and learn to detect them. Quishing Quishing, a phishing technique resulting from the combination of "QR" and "phishing," has become a popular weapon for cybercriminals in 2023. By concealing malicious links within QR codes, attackers can evade traditional spam filters, which are primarily geared towards identifying text-based phishing attempts. The inability of many security tools to decipher the content of QR codes further makes this method a go-to choice for cybercriminals. An email containing a QR code with a malicious link Analyzing a QR code with an embedded malicious link in a safe environment is easy with  ANY.RUN : Simply open  this task  in th...

Phishing works no matter how hard a company tries to protect its customers or employees. Security researchers have been warning of a new phishing attack that cybercriminals and email scammers are using in the wild to bypass the Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) mechanism implemented by widely used email services like Microsoft Office 365. Microsoft Office 365 is an all-in-solution for users that offers several different online services, including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online and other Office Web Apps, like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote. On the top of these services, Microsoft also offers an artificial intelligence and machine learning powered security protection to help defend against potential phishing and other threats by going one level deep to scan the links in the email bodies to look for any blacklisted or suspicious domain. But as I said, phishers always find a way to bypass security protections in order to victimize users. Just ...

A new, large-scale phishing campaign has been observed using adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) techniques to get around security protections and compromise enterprise email accounts. "It uses an adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) attack technique capable of bypassing multi-factor authentication," Zscaler researchers Sudeep Singh and Jagadeeswar Ramanukolanu  said  in a Tuesday report. "The campaign is specifically designed to reach end users in enterprises that use Microsoft's email services." Prominent targets include fintech, lending, insurance, energy, manufacturing, and federal credit union verticals located in the U.S., U.K., New Zealand, and Australia. This is not the first time such a phishing attack has come to light. Last month, Microsoft  disclosed  that over 10,000 organizations had been targeted since September 2021 by means of AitM techniques to breach accounts secured with multi-factor authentication (MFA). The ongoing campaign, effective June 2022,...

It takes just one email to compromise an entire system. A single well-crafted message can bypass filters, trick employees, and give attackers the access they need. Left undetected, these threats can lead to credential theft, unauthorized access, and even full-scale breaches. As phishing techniques become more evasive, they can no longer be reliably caught by automated solutions alone. Let's take a closer look at how SOC teams can ensure fast, accurate detection of even the most evasive phishing attacks, using the example of Tycoon2FA, the number one phishing threat in the corporate environment today. Step 1: Upload a suspicious file or URL to the sandbox Let's consider a typical situation: a suspicious email gets flagged by your detection system, but it's unclear whether it's indeed malicious. The fastest way to check it is to run a quick analysis inside a malware sandbox. A sandbox is an isolated virtual machine where you can safely open files, click links, and observe behavior ...

Cybersecurity researchers are alerting of phishing campaigns that abuse  Cloudflare Workers  to serve phishing sites that are used to harvest users' credentials associated with Microsoft, Gmail, Yahoo!, and cPanel Webmail. The attack method, called transparent phishing or adversary-in-the-middle ( AitM ) phishing, "uses Cloudflare Workers to act as a reverse proxy server for a legitimate login page, intercepting traffic between the victim and the login page to capture credentials, cookies, and tokens," Netskope researcher Jan Michael Alcantara  said  in a report. A majority of phishing campaigns hosted on Cloudflare Workers over the past 30 days have targeted victims in Asia, North America, and Southern Europe, spanning technology, financial services, and banking sectors. The cybersecurity firm said that an increase in traffic to Cloudflare Workers-hosted phishing pages was first registered in Q2 2023, noting it observed a spike in the total number of d...

A Spanish-speaking cybercrime group named GXC Team has been observed bundling phishing kits with malicious Android applications, taking malware-as-a-service (MaaS) offerings to the next level. Singaporean cybersecurity company Group-IB, which has been tracking the e-crime actor since January 2023, described the crimeware solution as a "sophisticated AI-powered phishing-as-a-service platform" capable of targeting users of more than 36 Spanish banks, governmental bodies, and 30 institutions worldwide. The phishing kit is priced anywhere between $150 and $900 a month, whereas the bundle including the phishing kit and Android malware is available on a subscription basis for about $500 per month. Targets of the campaign include users of Spanish financial institutions, as well as tax and governmental services, e-commerce, banks, and cryptocurrency exchanges in the United States, the United Kingdom, Slovakia, and Brazil. As many as 288 phishing domains linked to the activity ha...

Phishing incidents are on the rise. A report from IBM shows that phishing was the most popular attack vector in 2021, resulting in one in five employees falling victim to phishing hacking techniques. The Need for Security Awareness Training  Although technical solutions protect against phishing threats, no solution is 100% effective . Consequently, companies have no choice but to involve their employees in the fight against hackers. This is where security awareness training comes into play.  Security awareness training gives companies the confidence that their employees will execute the right response when they discover a phishing message in their inbox. As the saying goes, "knowledge is power," but the effectiveness of knowledge depends heavily on how it is delivered. When it comes to phishing attacks, simulations are among the most effective forms of training because the events in training simulations directly mimic how an employee would react in the event of an actu...

DMARC  is a global standard for email authentication. It allows senders to verify that the email really comes from whom it claims to come from. This helps curb spam and phishing attacks, which are among the most prevalent cybercrimes of today. Gmail, Yahoo, and many other large email providers have implemented DMARC and praised its benefits in recent years. If your company's domain name is bankofamerica.com, you do not want a cyber attacker to be able to send emails under that domain. This puts your brand reputation at risk and could potentially spread financial malware. The DMARC standard prevents this by checking whether emails are sent from an expected IP address or domain. It specifies how domains can be contacted if there are authentication or migration issues and provides forensic information so senders can monitor email traffic and quarantine suspicious emails. What is a Phishing Attack? Phishing is an attempt by cybercriminals to trick victims into giving away sensitive...