Tag: email attacks
Cyera secures $540 million in funding – June 11th
Cybersecurity firm Cyera has raised $540 million in a Series E funding round, bringing its total to over $1.3 billion. Cyera’s valuation has surged to $6 billion in six months, reporting a 353 percent year-over-year growth.
Cybercriminals ramp up AI-driven deepfake scams
Cyber toolkits for threat actors are now harnessing the latest deepfake technology and artificial intelligence (AI) for targeted email attacks, known as ‘spear-phishing.’ According to cloud cybersecurity firm Egress, a staggering 82 percent of phishing toolkits mentioned deepfakes, and 75 percent referenced AI. The growing threat presented by the use of deepfakes by cybercriminals was highlighted earlier this year at InfoSecurity Europe in London. Widely available toolkits now enable even relatively unskilled hackers to create highly convincing video and audio clips of chief executives (CEOs) and other senior staff members in any specific organization. All the threat actor needs is a short video clip of the person they wish to impersonate. This can easily be copied from a corporate seminar or from a video podcast.
Cyber gangs hold healthcare ransom
Cybercriminal groups have now completely abandoned any pretense that theirs are basically victimless crimes by attacking the healthcare sector with increasing ruthlessness. Healthcare, once said to be off limits to ‘responsible’ cyber criminals, is now the subject of an urgent warning from the Cybersecurity Coordination Center (HC3) of the US Department of Health and Human Services. “HC3 has recently observed threat actors employing advanced social engineering tactics to target IT help desks in the health sector and gain initial access to target organizations,” the warning states. Tactics include contacting an organization’s IT help desk with phone calls from a familiar area code and claiming to be an employee in a financial role.
US healthcare attacks rise threefold
Following hard on the heels of the recent attack on the US Red Cross comes a report that text-based email attacks on the healthcare sector have risen almost threefold this year. Cybersecurity firm Abnormal Security reports that the healthcare industry has also seen an overall 167% increase in advanced email attacks in 2023, which includes credential phishing, malware, business email compromise (BEC), and extortion.