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 […]
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 […]
SamSam and the Rise of Corporate Ransomware
The SamSam ransomware that caused serious damage to a California hospital and has infected many other enterprises in the United States is continuing to evolve and add new functionality as its developers look to stay ahead of researchers and defenders. SamSam is part of the newer wave of ransomware variants that don’t just rely on individual […]
Data Shows Phone Fraud Costing Businesses as Much as $27M a Year
Last year, about one in every 1,700 calls to a corporate call center in the United States was from a fraudster, and those malicious calls can cost large organizations as much as $27 million per year, new research shows. The rate of phone fraud in corporate call centers has jumped by more than 45 percent in the last […]
Jolly Roger and the Rise of the Anti-Bot Bots
A bot that started as a way for one man to annoy and frustrate telemarketers and robocallers has now developed into a subscription service for consumers and businesses who have had enough of the unsolicited and sometimes fraudulent calls. The Jolly Roger Telephone Co. is the creation of Roger Anderson, a phone industry veteran who […]
Hear a Real Bank Phone Fraud Call From a Fake Cop
The ongoing problem of fraudsters targeting senior citizens with sophisticated phone scams has taken a new turn, as the criminals have begun using a technique that involves them showing up at victims’ homes to collect their debit cards. The scam is an extension of a common phone fraud technique in which criminals call victims–typically senior […]
Verizon DBIR Shows Focus on Credential Theft in Breaches
Attackers are continuing to refine their tactics and develop new tools, but in a lot of cases they still rely on tried-and-true methods such as phishing, social engineering, malware, keyloggers, and credential theft to achieve their goals. The 2016 Verizon Data Breach Incident Report shows that these tactics and tools are still among the most-used by […]
U.S. Firm Hit For Nearly $100M in Email Scam
Fraudsters employing an increasingly common scheme known as business email compromise victimized a United States company for more than $98 million, according to a suit filed by the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan Thursday. The civil forfeiture lawsuit is an attempt to recover $25 million in funds held in a variety of overseas accounts, money […]
FBI Says Fake CEO Email Scam Losses Hit $2.3 Billion
The FBI says it has seen a huge increase in the volume of business email compromise scams hitting enterprises in the last year, and estimates that losses from the scheme have hit $2.3 billion now. Like normal phishing scams, these kinds of attacks rely on highly believable messages and a healthy dose of social engineering […]