On the Wire Podcast: Rick Holland
Rick Holland has seen the security world from a variety of interesting angles. He’s been a practitioner, an industry analyst, and is now the vice president of strategy at Digital Shadows. He’s been digging around in all of the interesting data that the company collects from the public Internet and the deep Web and in […]
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 […]
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 […]
Driving Robocallers Crazy With the Jolly Roger Bot
Robocalls are among the more annoying modern inventions, and consumers and businesses have tried just about every strategy for defeating them over the years, with little success. But one man has come up with a bot of his own that sends robocallers into a maddening hall of mirrors designed to frustrate them into surrender. The bot […]
Google Expands Social Engineering Protection in Safe Browsing
Google is expanding the way that its Safe Browsing API protects users against malicious content by blocking deceptive content on sites that is considered to be social engineering. The change to Safe Browsing will focus on detecting and warning users about content that tries to trick users into downloading a piece of software or taking […]
New Data Shows Google Listing Phone Scam On the Rise
Like malware authors, phone scammers change their tactics and lures often, but for the most part, they play the hits. And the number one song so far this year has been the Google/Yahoo/Bing listing scam that accounted for 22 percent of robocalls in January. The new data from Pindrop Labs shows that scammers are using this […]
CEO Phishing Scam Costs Belgian Bank Crelan $75M
The venerable phishing scam has been trying on some new clothes as of late, and quite often those outfits are costing victims dearly. The latest and perhaps most expensive of these is the version of the executive email scheme that hit a Belgian bank recently and cost the firm more than $75 million. This particular scheme, which also […]
Feds Indict More Than 50 in Jury Duty Phone Fraud Scam
Federal officials have indicted more than 50 people, including 15 former prison officials and 19 former inmates, in a long-running vishing and phone fraud scheme that was run through a Georgia prison. Using cell phones smuggled into Autry State Prison by guards, the inmates would call victims, mostly in the Atlanta metro area, and inform them […]
Fake Tech Support Scams Evolve to Include Support, Purchase History
Calling a tech support line can be a fairly miserable experience. Having tech support reps calling you at home to warn you about supposed malware on your PC is even worse. It’s an old scam, but one that’s gotten a vicious new twist of late with scammers who know every detail of a victim’s support […]