Inside the Tech Support Scam Ecosystem
By Jonah Berg-Ganzarain A pair of doctoral students and their advisor, looking for insights into the inner workings of tech support scams, spent eight months collecting data on and studying the tactics and infrastructure of the scammers, using a purpose-built tool. What they uncovered is a complex, technically sophisticated ecosystem supported by malvertising and victimizing people around […]
FCC Warns on New ‘Can You Hear Me’ Phone Scam
Phone scammers have adopted a new tactic recently that is part of a long-term scheme to impersonate victims during calls with banks or other financial institutions. The new technique involves a scammer calling a victim and when the victim answers, immediately asking, “Can you hear me?” The idea is to record the victim’s voice as […]
Email Scam Losses Pass $3 Billion, FBI Says
The amount of money that enterprises in the United States are losing to business email compromise scams is growing at an alarming rate, and is now well into the billions of dollars, according to the FBI. BEC scams, also known as CEO or executive impersonation schemes, are the evolution of phishing attacks and rely on the criminals’ […]
Your Brain Is Bad at Security
OAKLAND–Security teams are frustrated constantly by users who ignore warnings about phishing sites, bad certificates, or malware, and just click through to get wherever they were going. It turns out that behavior probably isn’t the users’ fault. It’s just human nature. There are many reasons why this behavior persists, even when users are told in no uncertain […]
Gmail Phishing Campaign Racking Up Victims
There is a clever, well-crafted phishing campaign targeting Gmail users that includes a fake login page that exactly mimics the real thing to trick victims into entering their credentials. The campaign has been going on for some time but it recently began to gain attention after researchers analyzed it and broke down the techniques the […]
How Social Engineering Enables Fraud
Fraudsters who are looking to separate businesses from their money often will specialize in one kind of scam. Whether it’s credit card fraud, 419 scams, or phone fraud, the people behind these schemes tend to focus their energy on one and learn it inside and out. But despite that specialization, there are common skills that […]
Financial Fraud Trending in the Wrong Direction
When discussing financial fraud, people often talk about it as one overarching problem. But the reality is that in today’s environment, fraud comprises many separate, distinct components, each with its own techniques, complexities, and challenges for organizations trying to defend against them. Customers interact with their financial institutions in a variety of ways: in-person, online, […]
FCC, Canadian Authorities to Cooperate on Robocall Enforcement
Federal authorities in the United States and Canada have signed an agreement that will allow them to share information on robocalls and caller ID spoofing and cooperate on investigations and enforcement actions. The new memorandum of understanding between the FCC and the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission will allow the two agencies to share a wide […]
U.S. Indicts 61 in International Phone Fraud Operation
Three weeks after authorities in India disrupted a major phone fraud ring in Mumbai, the Department of Justice has indicted 61 people in relation to the scam, which officials say generated as much as $150,000 per day. The indictments are the result of investigations involving U.S. and Indian authorities and the phone fraud scheme affected tens […]