Affinity phishing scams are ones in which criminals cultivate trust in their prospective victims by trading on common background, either real or feigned. Thus a fraudster might claim a common religion, a shared military background, membership in a profession, or a common ethnicity, all with the goal convincing the victim that they can be trusted. What follows all too often one can readily imagine.
With all the overwrought hype with ChatGPT and AI…much of it earned…you could be forgiven for thinking that only the bad actors are going to be using these advanced technologies and the rest of us are at their mercy. But this is not an asymmetric battle where the bad actors use AI and the rest of us are struggling using our pencils and abacuses to catch up. It is the good side that invented and is accelerating AI. It is the good scientists that made ChatGPT and all of its competitors.
Anticipation leads people to suspend their better judgment as a new campaign of credential theft exploits a person’s excitement about the newest AI systems not yet available to the general public. On Tuesday morning, April 11th, Veriti explained that several unknown actors are making false Facebook ads which advertise a free download of AIs like ChatGPT and Google Bard.
4/11/2023 - Gizmodo just dropped this eye-roll inducing news. The disgraced crypto exchange had no dedicated cybersecurity staff and "protected" users assets with minimal safeguards, according to new bankruptcy filings. Here are just two paragraphs of the whole story. The whole thing is unbelievable.
Researchers at Securonix are tracking an ongoing phishing campaign dubbed “TACTICAL#OCTOPUS” that’s been targeting users in the US with tax-related phishing emails.
Phishing attacks that can evade detection by email scanners are improving their chances of reaching the inbox, thanks to an increase in the use of one specific attachment type. According to new data found in HP Wolf Security’s latest Security Threat Insights Report for Q4 of 2022, 13% of all email threats being sent make their way past layered email security defenses to reach the user’s inbox. This, up from the previously published finding of 11.7% of threats doing so by Acronis.
Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has published a report describing the activities of “ARCHIPELAGO,” a subset of the North Korean state-sponsored threat actor APT43. ARCHIPELAGO’s operators frequently impersonate real journalists or experts in order to make initial contact with their targets.
A newly documented phishing campaign demonstrates how timely themes can be impactful in creating a successful attack that gets the recipient to engage with malicious content. As we approach this year’s deadline for filing taxes in the U.S. for 2022, security researchers from Malwarebytes have provided details of an IRS-themed phishing email received by their very own Senior Director of Threat Intelligence.
A new public service announcement focuses on a specific form of BEC attack using little more than a spoofed domain and common vendor payment practices to steal hardware, supplies and more. When I talk about BEC attacks, it’s usually a digital fraud type of attack where legitimate funds being paid to a vendor are diverted to an attacker-controlled bank account by means of the attacker using a spoofed domain or via email compromise.
