Russian nation-state hackers have followed an unusual path to gather intel in the country's ongoing invasion of Ukraine—appropriating the infrastructure of fellow threat actors and using it to infect electronic devices its adversary’s military personnel are using on the front line. On at least two occasions this …

Phishing attacks increased nearly 40 percent in the year ending August 2024, with much of that growth concentrated at a small number of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) — such as.shop,.top,.xyz — that attract scammers with rock-bottom prices and no meaningful registration requirements, new research finds. Meanwhile, the …

Federal prosecutors have charged five men with running an extensive phishing scheme that allegedly allowed them to compromise hundreds of companies nationwide, gain non-public information, and steal millions of dollars in cryptocurrency. The charges, detailed in court documents unsealed Wednesday, pertain to a crime group security researchers have dubbed …

A number of cybercriminal innovations are making it easier for scammers to cash in on your upcoming travel plans. This story examines a recent spear-phishing campaign that ensued when a California hotel had its booking.com credentials stolen. We’ll also explore an array of cybercrime services aimed at …

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) A coalition of law-enforcement agencies said it shut down a service that facilitated the unlocking of more than 1.2 million stolen or lost mobile phones so they could be used by someone other than their rightful owner. The service was part of iServer, a …

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Phishers are using a novel technique to trick iOS and Android users into installing malicious apps that bypass safety guardrails built by both Apple and Google to prevent unauthorized apps. Both mobile operating systems employ mechanisms designed to help users steer clear of apps that …

Enlarge / Roger Stone, former adviser to Donald Trump's presidential campaign, center, during the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee on July 17, 2024. (credit: Getty Images) Google's Threat Analysis Group confirmed Wednesday that they observed a threat actor backed by the Iranian government targeting Google accounts associated with US …

A piece I coauthored with Fredrik Heiding and Arun Vishwanath in the Harvard Business Review : Summary. Gen AI tools are rapidly making these emails more advanced, harder to spot, and significantly more dangerous. Recent research showed that 60% of participants fell victim to artificial intelligence (AI)-automated phishing, which …

Brian Krebs reported that X (formerly known as Twitter) started automatically changing twitter.com links to x.com links. The problem is: (1) it changed any domain name that ended with “twitter.com,” and (2) it only changed the link’s appearance (anchortext), not the underlying URL. So if …

On April 9, Twitter/X began automatically modifying links that mention “twitter.com” to read “x.com” instead. But over the past 48 hours, dozens of new domain names have been registered that demonstrate how this change could be used to craft convincing phishing links — such as fedetwitter[.]com …

Thread hijacking attacks. They happen when someone you know has their email account compromised, and you are suddenly dropped into an existing conversation between the sender and someone else. These missives draw on the recipient’s natural curiosity about being copied on a private discussion, which is modified to …

Enlarge / They look like normal notifications, but opening an iPhone with one or more of these stacked up, you won't be able to do much of anything until you tap "Allow" or "Don't Allow." And they're right next to each other. (credit: Kevin Purdy) Human weaknesses are a rich …

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Hundreds of Microsoft Azure accounts, some belonging to senior executives, are being targeted by unknown attackers in an ongoing campaign that's aiming to steal sensitive data and financial assets from dozens of organizations, researchers with security firm Proofpoint said Monday. The campaign attempts to compromise …

Enlarge / A woman scans a QR code in a café to see the menu online. The US Federal Trade Commission has become the latest organization to warn against the growing use of QR codes in scams that attempt to take control of smartphones, make fraudulent charges, or obtain personal …

Enlarge (credit: Wired staff; Getty Images) For state-sponsored hacking operations, unpatched vulnerabilities are valuable ammunition. Intelligence agencies and militaries seize on hackable bugs when they're revealed—exploiting them to carry out their campaigns of espionage or cyberwar—or spend millions to dig up new ones or to buy them …

One frustrating aspect of email phishing is the frequency with which scammers fall back on tried-and-true methods that really have no business working these days. Like attaching a phishing email to a traditional, clean email message, or leveraging link redirects on LinkedIn, or abusing an encoding method that makes …

Enlarge / Man hand holding a mobile phone with QR code. (credit: Getty Images) Phishing mongers have released a torrent of image-based junk emails that embed QR codes into their bodies to successfully bypass security protections and provide a level of customization to more easily fool recipients, researchers said. In …

I get UPS phishing spam on my phone all the time. I never click on it, because it’s so obviously spam. Turns out that hackers have been harvesting actual UPS delivery data from a Canadian tracking tool for its phishing SMSs. [...]

Researchers are worried about Google’s.zip and.mov domains, because they are confusing. Mistaking a URL for a filename could be a security vulnerability. [...]

Here’s an experiment being run by undergraduate computer science students everywhere: Ask ChatGPT to generate phishing emails, and test whether these are better at persuading victims to respond or click on the link than the usual spam. It’s an interesting experiment, and the results are likely to …

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Carol Yepes) Hackers have devised a way to bypass ChatGPT ’s restrictions and are using it to sell services that allow people to create malware and phishing emails, researchers said on Wednesday. ChatGPT is a chatbot that uses artificial intelligence to answer questions and perform …

This is a good list of modern phishing techniques. [...]

CISA is now pushing phishing-resistant multifactor authentication. Roger Grimes has an excellent post reminding everyone that “phishing-resistant” is not “phishing proof,” and that everyone needs to stop pretending otherwise. His list of different attacks is particularly useful. [...]

It’s big : The breach appeared to have compromised many of Uber’s internal systems, and a person claiming responsibility for the hack sent images of email, cloud storage and code repositories to cybersecurity researchers and The New York Times. “They pretty much have full access to Uber,” said …

Here’s a phishing campaign that uses a man-in-the-middle attack to defeat multi-factor authentication: Microsoft observed a campaign that inserted an attacker-controlled proxy site between the account users and the work server they attempted to log into. When the user entered a password into the proxy site, the proxy …