Criminals, too, see productivity gains from AI
Cyber criminals are beginning to use artificial intelligence to make their operations more effective — and their use goes way beyond creating better bait for phishing. Just as in legitimate business, discussions about AI among criminals have accelerated this year compared to 2023, researchers from cybersecurity group Intel 471 reported in a new study published…
Cyberattack Disrupts Unemployment Benefits in Some States
In Tennessee, the website for unemployment benefits remained down Thursday morning after the vendor, Geographic Solutions Inc., told the state Sunday that service would be interrupted. Some 12,000 Tennesseans rely on the unemployment program, and for now, they’re not getting their payments. The company said that it expects Tennessee’s system to be back online before…
Are employees the weakest link in your security strategy? Train them!
Email is the number one threat vector. There’s no exception, even with a global pandemic, on the contrary: COVID-19 has been used as an appealing hook by cyber criminals. Data from Trend Micro Smart Protection Network shows that for the first five months of 2020, 92 per cent of all the cyber threats leveraging COVID-19…
7 unexpected ways GDPR and other privacy regulations make security harder
The smallest well-intentioned acts can have significant unintended negative consequences. When those acts have a global impact on individuals and businesses, the unanticipated negative effects could potentially be catastrophic. That’s what some experts fear when it comes to the ability of security teams to do their jobs in the wake of new privacy regulations, in…
PowerShell Threats Grow Further and Operate in Plain Sight
The preinstalled and versatile Windows PowerShell has become one of the most popular choices in cyber criminals’ arsenals. We have observed an increase of 661 percent in computers where malicious PowerShell activity was blocked from the second half of 2017 to the first half of 2018—a clear indication that attackers are still growing the use…
Cloud-Delivered Network Security No Longer Optional
The adoption of the public cloud is driving a fundamental change in the way organizations connect remote users and distributed sites to their networks and applications. But as we’ve seen during other great times of change, tech transitions are tricky and always raise new security concerns. These are the security concerns of the Cloud Generation….
Cyber attacks surge, ransomware leading the way
The Online Trust Alliance (OTA) found that cyber incidents targeting businesses nearly doubled from 82,000 in 2016 to 159,700 in 2017. Since the majority of cyber incidents are never reported, OTA believes the actual number in 2017 could easily exceed 350,000. “Surprising no one, 2017 marked another ‘worst year ever’ in data breaches and cyber incidents around the world,”…
How cybercriminals abuse the travel and hospitality industry
The travel and hospitality industry suffers billions of losses each year due to fraud. “With the right combination of other underground services (compromised accounts, credit cards, etc.) it is possible to cover almost every aspect of the holidays, including food and restaurants, shopping, entertainment, guided tours and more – way beyond flights and hotels,” Vladimir…
US charged 3 Chinese security firm hackers with corporate cyber-espionage
The Department of Justice charged three Chinese nationals working for an internet security firm in China with hacking three companies and stealing hundreds of gigabytes of data and trade secrets from Siemens AG, Moody’s Analytics and GPS maker Trimble between early 2011 and May 2017. Both the malware and the organization to which defendants Wu…
BEC Attacks Far More Lucrative than Ransomware over Past 3 Years
BEC fraud netted cyberthieves five times more profit than ransomware over a three-year period, according to Cisco’s midyear report released today. Despite all the recent attention paid to ransomware, cybercriminals walked away with $5.3 billion from business email compromise (BEC) attacks compared with $1 billion for ransomware over a three-year stretch, according to Cisco’s 2017…