Tag: financial
AI-engineered email attacks are on the rise
Email scams aimed at business users are becoming increasingly sophisticated and increasingly tough to detect. Threat actors are now using artificial intelligence to research their targets in advance of an attack, a process known as ‘social engineering.’ Phishing attacks and email scams that appear to come from a trusted source make up 35.5% of all socially engineered threats, according to a report from cybersecurity firm Barracuda: Top Email Threats and Trends. Although these types of attacks have been around for some time, cybercriminals have recently devised ingenious new methods to avoid detection and being blocked by email-scanning technologies.
BogusBazarr signals red light for brands
By operating a “fraud-as-a-service’ (FaaS) website, BogusBazarr, operating out of China, runs 200 fraudulent webshops and has so far claimed 850,000 victims, mostly from the US and Western Europe. Victims who access BogusBazarr shops are offered amazing-sounding deals on shoes and apparel from well-known brands. But as the webshops are totally fraudulent, the victims end up having their credit card details stolen with nothing to show for it.
SSCL named as breached MoD contractor
UK-based Shared Services Connected Limited (SSCL) has been named as the Ministry of Defence (MoD) contractor hacked by, according to senior government sources, China. British defense minister Grant Shapps has admitted that the personal and financial details of 272,000 service personnel were hacked by “a malign actor.” However, the breach is now being widely attributed to China, despite China’s dismissal of the allegations as “absurd”. But while the compromised payment system has now been taken offline, there are growing fears that the breach may not merely be confined to the MoD, as SSCL handle a number of UK government contracts. “We’re the largest provider of critical business support services for the Government, the UK Military & Veterans (MoD), Metropolitan Police Service, and the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB),” boasts SSCL on its website.
Cybercrime continues to cold-shoulder AI
Organized cybercriminals continue to give artificial intelligence (AI) the cold shoulder. New research from US telecoms conglomerate Verizon confirms a report in November from cybersecurity firm Sophos revealing that cybercriminals judged AI to be “overrated, overhyped and redundant.” According to Verizon’s 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report: “We did keep an eye out for any indications of the use of the emerging field of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in attacks and the potential effects of those technologies, but nothing materialized in the incident data we collected globally…The number of mentions of GenAI terms alongside traditional attack types and vectors such as “phishing,” “malware,” “vulnerability,” and “ransomware” was shockingly low, barely breaching 100 cumulative mentions over the past two years.”
Visa’s Warning on RAT Campaign Targeting Financial Orgs – April 5th
Visa released an alert on the 'JsOutProx' remote access trojan (RAT) malware phishing campaign which targets financial institutions and customers. The JSOutProx malware linked to the 'Solar Spider' threat actor delivers a RAT that could steal sensitive data, establish a C2 connection, and extract Outlook information, among others.
Cloud security compromised by constant upgrades
There is mounting evidence that companies may have been naive in accepting Big Tech’s optimistic assurances that sensitive data can be stored more securely in the cloud than on the company’s own servers. In its latest Attack Surface Threat report, Silicon Valley-based cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks reveals that the cloud has now become “the dominant attack surface”, with four out of five security vulnerabilities observed in organizations across all sectors coming from a cloud environment.