Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Cybersecurity professionals face an increasingly aggressive phishing threat landscape, and the 2025 KnowBe4 Phishing By Industry Benchmarking Report makes one thing crystal clear: transforming your largest attack surface - your workforce - into your biggest security asset is critical. 49 Seconds to Disaster According to the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), the median time it takes someone to click a malicious link is a staggering 21 seconds.

Mandiant warns that the Scattered Spider cybercriminal group is using “brazen” social engineering attacks to target large enterprise organizations in a wide range of sectors. Specifically, the group targets “organizations with large help desk and outsourced IT functions which are susceptible to their social engineering tactics.” The threat actors impersonate employees and attempt to trick IT workers into granting them access. The group also poses as IT workers to target employees.

KnowBe4 ThreatLabs has identified and analyzed a sophisticated cross-platform phishing campaign that utilizes Telegram as its primary exfiltration channel. The campaign uses a combination of security-themed phishing emails, branded phishing websites to harvest credentials, and Telegram bots to exfiltrate data.

Just because you’re using a passkey doesn’t mean your password is gone. Microsoft is going passwordless in a new big push. As part of that new initiative, they are strongly pushing FIDO passkeys. I am a big fan of FIDO passkeys and FIDO in general. FIDO authentication offerings, including passkeys, are phishing-resistant, which makes them a HUGE improvement over passwords and most other multi-factor authentication products.

Researchers at Cisco Talos warn that major phishing kits continue to incorporate features that allow them to bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA). Commodity phishing kits like Tycoon 2FA and Evilproxy achieve this by using reverse proxies to intercept traffic from the authentication process during a phishing attack.

Phishing was the initial access vector in 50% of attacks during the first quarter of 2025, according to a new report from Cisco Talos. “Threat actors used phishing to achieve initial access in 50 percent of engagements, a notable increase from less than 10 percent last quarter,” Talos writes.

Researchers at Malwarebytes warn that phishing emails are impersonating the US Social Security Administration (SSA) to trick users into installing the ScreenConnect remote access tool. ScreenConnect is a legitimate tool used for remote IT management, but it can be abused by hackers to take control of victims’ computers.

Recently, I covered a T-Mobile scam where a friend of mine narrowly avoided losing money. In that scam, the attackers called up pretending to be from T-Mobile offering him a cannot-pass-up 30% discount on future T-Mobile bills. While he was initially suspicious of the unexpected callers, they gained his confidence by repeating the amounts of his last two T-Mobile bills, billing address, and knew that his wife was also on the account.

Email is still the most common attack vector for cyber threats, according to a new report from Barracuda. The researchers found that one in four emails during February 2025 was either malicious or spam. HTML attachments were the most common file type used in phishing emails. “One of the most striking findings from the report is that 23% of HTML attachments are malicious, making them the most weaponized type of text file,” Barracuda says.

A friend of mine got a call on his phone and he regrettably picked it up. The number was 267-332-3644. The area code is from Bucks County, PA, where he used to live many years ago. But since his multiple anti-scam phone filter apps did not flag the number as a scam, and it was from a place he used to live, he picked it up.