For any business, privacy and security are a constant concern. The variety and velocity of attacks seeking to infiltrate corporate systems and steal vital business and customer information seem never-ending. Given the very public repercussions of certain types of breaches, it can be easy for executives and IT professionals to focus attention on only the…

Cybercriminals are increasingly targeting hospitals, doctors’ offices, and other healthcare organizations, with attacks using Trojan malware climbing by 82% between the second and third quarters of this year. Cyberattacks against healthcare organizations jumped 60% in the first nine months of the year, compared to all of 2018, according to a report published this week by…

Attackers continue to leverage greater levels of social engineering and sophistication

Despite a nearly four-month absence, the return of Emotet within the last two weeks of September accounted for nearly 12 percent of all malicious email samples in Q3, delivering millions of messages with malicious URLs or attachments, Proofpoint found. Emotet returns, organizations need to react “Emotet’s return to the threat landscape and the latest sextortion…

Ransomware is becoming an epidemic for any collection or repository of data. Each day the attacks seem to be getting larger and more lucrative for cybercriminals. According to Europol’s annual report, the Internet Organised Crime Threat Assessment (IOCTA), file-encrypting malware attacks could become far more destructive as cybercriminals change their tactics. The IOCTA lists ransomware…

The number of phishing attacks continued to rise into the autumn of 2019, according to APWG. The total number of phishing sites detected in July through September 2019 was 266,387. This was up 46 percent from the 182,465 seen in the second quarter of 2019, and almost double the 138,328 seen in Q4 2018. “This…

Cybercrime is continuing to mature and becoming more and more bold, shifting its focus to larger and more profitable targets as well as new technologies. Data is the key element in cybercrime, both from a crime and an investigate perspective. These key threats demonstrate the complexity of countering cybercrime and highlight that criminals only innovate…

Phishing attacks up, especially against SaaS and webmail services

Phishing attacks continued to rise into the summer of 2019 with cybercrime gangs’ focus on branded webmail and SaaS providers remaining very keen, according to the APWG report. The report also documents how criminals are increasingly perpetrating business email compromise (BEC) attacks by using gift card cash-out schemes. The number of phishing attacks observed in…