CEO of FACC Fired After Firm Was Hit by Email Scam
An Austrian aerospace manufacturer that lost €50 million in a business email compromise scam earlier this year has fired its CEO over the incident. FACC, which makes components for the aerospace industry, said its board decided last week to fire Walter Stephan for his involvement in the scheme, after previously firing other employees. In January, officials […]
FBI May Soon Get Email Records Without Court Order
A Senate bill that passed out of committee this week includes language that would allow the FBI to get access to people’s emails without a court order. The provision would enable law enforcement to use National Security Letters to demand targets’ email records, a process that currently requires the use of a court order. NSLs […]
New Version of RansomWhere? OS X Detection Tool Released
The author of a generic detection tool for Mac OS X ransomware has updated the application, adding a number of new capabilities, including support for full file-system monitoring and support for older versions of the OS. RansomWhere? is a tool written by security researcher Patrick Wardle for the purpose of detecting and stopping ransomware behavior […]
Microsoft Hates Your Password
As stolen passwords and account information continue to flood the Internet, making life easier for lazy attackers, Microsoft is planning to roll out a new service on its Azure cloud platform that will prevent customers from using common passwords. The change is not just a requirement that users employ long or artificially complex passwords, but […]
Treasury Arrests Five For Alleged IRS Phone Scam
The Treasury Department has arrested five people who they say were running a phone scam that involved them impersonating IRS agents and threatening to arrest victims for not paying imaginary back taxes. The arrests are part of the federal government’s increased focus on phone fraud scams, especially those that involve criminals pretending to be IRS […]
Phone Fraud Scam Targets College Students For ‘Federal Student Tax’
The Federal Trade Commission is warning about a new variant on phone fraud scams that attempts to bully college students into paying a non-existent student tax. The scam is similar to many of the IRS phone scams that have been ongoing for several years, but with the novelty of pressuring students who likely are much […]
FBI: CEO Email Scams Cost U.S. Businesses $246M
Businesses in the United States lost more than $246 million to business email compromise attacks in 2015, dwarfing the losses to any other kind of attack, including phishing, vishing, ransomware, and credit card fraud. BEC scams involve a twist on the typical phishing emails, and aim to trick executives or finance employees who have authority […]
Google Project Abacus Aims to Replace Passwords on Android
Within the next six months, all Android developers likely will have access to a Google API stemming from its Project Abacus that aims to replace the password with a multi-modal system as the primary authenticator for mobile users. The idea behind the system is two-fold: passwords are rapidly approaching uselessness; and biometric identifiers are now […]
SWIFT Pushes Information Sharing After String of Bank Attacks
After a string of highly sophisticated and well-publicized attacks in recent weeks, officials at SWIFT, the banking payment consortium, are asking banks to improve their information sharing efforts to help combat future compromises. The SWIFT payment network has been targeted by several successful attacks recently, including one that resulted in the fraudulent transfer of $81 million […]