What Are the Seven Biggest Social Media Scams of 2018?
The massive rise in popularity of social platforms has led to a huge upswing in social media scams — putting a growing pool of users at risk. Facebook had 2.23 billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2018, while photo-sharing site Instagram hit 1 billion monthly active users by June 2018, according…
‘Congratulations, you won’ Malware Scam Crosses Over to Android
“Congratulations, you won!” would normally be a welcome phrase to see when you go online, instantly making you think of an all-expenses-paid vacation someplace exotic, or perhaps a substantial amount to add a few more zeroes to your bank account. If only it weren’t a favorite phrase among scammers too, you could actually already be on…
The top 5 dumbest cyber threats that work anyway
The common conception of cyber attacks is kind of like bad weather: ranging from irritating to catastrophic, but always unpredictable. Hackers are simply too sophisticated to draw any reliable judgments on and we shouldn’t try. As it turns out, some hackers are fairly predictable in their successful use of really dumb attacks. Here’s a few.
Tech support scammers and their banking woes
We all know about tech support scams by this point. We know how they cold call, lie their way into your computer, and steal your money. Unfortunately for the scammers, banks know this as well, making it quite difficult at times to maintain an account to store the criminal’s ill-gotten gains. So how does the…
Free Nintendo Switch emulators are fake
Fake emulators for newly released Nintendo console used as bait to get users to fill out survey scams and download potentially unwanted applications. Over the last few weeks, scammers have been trying to dupe users into believing that a software emulator exists for the Nintendo Switch, the company’s newest console that was released on March…
IRS issues new tax scam warnings, FSA tool suspended due to security concerns
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has issued a new warning to businesses, taxpayers, and tax prep professionals about Phishing scams targeting the sensitive information they work with on a daily basis. Soon after, the IRS and the US Department of Education suspended a tool that helps people obtain financial aid for college. The warning from…
Fake FBI mail: “Send us $112 or we’ll lock your iCloud account”
Here’s a scam mail which claims your iCloud has been accessed without permission, and will be locked within 2 hours if you don’t verify the account by sending $112 to a Bitcoin address. The missive claims to be from [email protected] and is titled, “Virus Warning: E-Mail from ‘FBI Alert”.
How do I get my employees to stop clicking on everything?
If you’ve been given responsibility for network security in a non-technical area of the business, there’s one eternal question that has been bedeviling admins for decades. Shelves of words have been spilled on the subject, to limited result. Everyone with cybersecurity responsibilities has their own crop of horror stories where an intransigent user has clicked…
Tech support scam page triggers denial-of-service attack on Macs
Tech support scammers have been using various themes to push fake alerts to scare users into calling for assistance. These fall into the ‘browlock’ category if they are via the browser and into the screen lockers category if they are actual malware that runs on the system. Recently, there has been a trend for scammers to cause…
A closer look at a tech support screen locker
In this blog post, we are going to take a closer look at some of the code that the most predominant family of tech support screen lockers are currently using to frustrate their victims. This, which is dubbed VinCE because of the Program folder it creates for itself, is compiled in Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL),…