Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

If you’ve ever run an online ad campaign, be it through an advertising agency or in-house, there’s a very high chance that you, too, have fallen victim to undetected ad fraud. It’s not pleasant to hear, but your ad dollars often find their way into the pockets of cyber crooks. The costs of ad fraud are astronomical and continue to grow year after year. In Q1 of 2024, ad networks experienced an 18% click fraud rate across desktop web (26%), mobile web (15%), and mobile in-app (10%).

More transactions, less vigilant consumers, and countless digital impersonators ready to exploit them – for scam-targeted industries and cyber teams, the holiday season is a full-spectrum stress test. Those who pass with flying colors have likely adopted key reinforcements that adapt posture for the era of off-the-shelf social engineering scams assisted by AI. Those that don’t are likely still reliant on outdated solutions and customer education.

Imagine scanning a QR code to pay for parking or to buy a new jacket, only to realize you handed over credentials or card data to fraudsters. Yes – phishing is now also an offline phenomena, expanding its reach into real-world spaces via QR codes. Known as ‘QRishing’, this increasingly common attack exploits growing reliance on QR codes in both online and everyday physical environments, exploiting users’ lack of vigilance.

From groceries to gadgets, everything can be delivered to your doorstep these days with just a few clicks. In this e-commerce world, logistics and postal companies have become critical players in the retail sector, with brand names that everyone recognizes. But this has also made them goldmines of PII that attackers would do anything to get their hands on.

As mobile technology becomes integral to day-to-day life, fraudsters are refining phishing techniques to exploit vulnerabilities in mobile browsing. According to Zimperium’s 2024 zLabs Global Mobile Threat report, 82% of phishing sites specifically targeted mobile devices in 2023. To protect customer data, enterprises need to counter-adapt.

In social engineering attacks like smishing and phishing, the mind is the real target. How often do we quickly glance at a text or email and click without a second thought about its origins? Scammers know this, so they prey on the urgency conveyed in the convincing messages sent to your valued customers and unprepared coworkers. Opportunistic scammers send 3.4 billion spam emails daily.

Fraud isn’t just evolving- it’s exploding. What once involved old-fashioned pickpockets and stolen wallets is now a digital battlefield. And scammers are getting increasingly creative, too. From sophisticated cloned websites to deceptive phishing schemes, they are making it substantially harder for businesses to protect themselves and their customers.

The expansion of your attack surface is inevitable. As your business grows, so does the need to leverage API integrations and third-party tooling to ensure your product remains competitive. But what about ensuring that your product remains secure? The proportion of breaches involving supply chain interconnection increased by 68% between 2023 and 2024. Attackers are not just interested in your data – they are after the weak links in your interconnected systems.

Every step you take, every move you make, some company will be watching you. While user activity monitoring may sound invasive at first, the growing number of insider and external threats makes it compulsory for companies to understand how users interact with their systems. 43% of workers report their employer monitors their online activity, and this percentage rises to 48% for hybrid employees.

Like the speed of light, phishing remains a reliable constant in the cybercrime universe, never going out of fashion with fraudsters, always reinventing itself to stay relevant. As part of that reinvention, phishing-related scams increasingly use search engine optimization (SEO) to drive malicious websites higher in search results, outranking legitimate sites whose brands they often impersonate.