IRS Warns of 400% Jump in Tax Scams
The IRS is warning consumers about a huge spike in the volume of phishing emails related to tax return fraud, something that has become an annual occurrence. The warning comes a couple weeks after the agency issued a similar warning about phone fraud scams related to the IRS. Numbers compiled by the agency show that […]
Owning VOIP Phones With Zero Clicks
Researchers have uncovered a simple method for compromising some common VOIP phones, enabling them to listen to victims’ calls covertly or use the phones to make expensive or fraudulent calls. The attack takes advantage of the fact that the affected phones don’t have any authentication set up by default, but do have a vulnerability that […]
Google Data Shows Dangers of Third-Party App Stores
TENERIFE–Google’s position in the Internet world is a unique one. In one or another, the company controls or sees much of the traffic on the network and owns one of the larger computing arsenals on the planet. It’s also in control of a decent chunk of the mobile world, thanks to Android’s popularity, and securing […]
MazarBOT Android Malware Spreads Via SMS
As phones have become more and more vital to users’ lives, attackers and fraudsters have focused a larger portion of their attention on those devices. One of the key methods of attack is delivering malware through texts or MMS messages and researchers have discovered a new malicious SMS campaign that is infecting Android phones and can […]
UK Launches Task Force to Address Fraud
Phone fraud, vishing, and other forms of financial fraud have emerged as serious threats to many financial institutions and their customers. Banks and government agencies have begun forming alliances to help address the issue, and the latest is a new task force in the U.K., comprising banks, law enforcement, and government agencies, that will help […]
On the Wire Podcast: Mike Mimoso
In a remote episode of the podcast, Dennis Fisher talks with Mike Mimoso of Threatpost about the sessions from the Security Analyst Summit in Tenerife, Spain. The discussion touches on IoT security, the security development lifecycle, and whether device security will improve anytime soon.
Time is Now For an IoT Security Development Lifecycle
TENERIFE–Microsoft engineers, executives, and developers have spent much of the past decade spreading the gospel of the security development lifecycle (SDL), trying to convert people and organizations to the religion of building security into software and other products from the beginning of the process. That effort has succeeded in many ways, and now experts say […]
Introducing On the Wire
The threats in the phone channel evolve rapidly. Scammers move quickly from scheme to scheme, playing on victims’ fears and vulnerabilities to separate them from their money. Whether the target is an international bank or an individual consumer, the threats are just as sophisticated and effective. It can be difficult to keep up. Pindrop is […]
Researchers Focus on Attacking Satellite Systems
TENERIFE–The security of wireless networks and devices is generally regarded as somewhere between mediocre and horrendous. And that’s after nearly 20 years of attention from researchers. Now, some of those researchers are focusing on satellite systems and networks and are finding the security of those targets depressingly bad. Gabriel Gonzalez, a researcher at IO Active, […]