Security Awareness Training Blog

Keeping You Informed. Keeping You Aware.
Stay on top of the latest in security including social engineering, ransomware and phishing attacks.

Bitdefender Creates Ransomware Recognition Tool

The AV vendor created a free tool to help ransomware victims find which family and sub-version of ransomware has encrypted their data and then get the appropriate decryption tool, if it ...
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Whole Foods Point Of Sale Data Breach. Did Amazon Buy An Organic Lemon?

Uh Oh. They just announced. Generally it's the tip of the iceberg, and then over time more details are released that show it was muuuch worse than initially expected. Looks like Amazon ...
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New Locky Ransomware Strain Evades Machine Learning Security Software

Here is the latest tactic in the cat-and-mouse game between cybercrime and security software vendors. The bad guys have come up with new a ransomware phishing attack, tricking users to ...
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Europol warns ransomware has taken cybercrime ‘to another level’

Europol, the European Union’s police agency, has warned of the significantly rising threat posed by ransomware. As Associated Press reports, delegates at an international conference were ...
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Data points from Risk IQ Q2 Phishing Roundup

Threat Management Provider Risk IQ released data comparing the use of top 10 brands names in Phishing attacks from Q1 and Q2, 2017. The report doesn’t name the top ten brands favored by ...
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Scam of The Week: "Fake-tortion" Phishing Attacks

OK, this is a heads-up about a new aggressive form of email attack that you need to warn your employees, friends and family about. The bad guys have beta-tested and refined it in ...
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Equifax appears to be training recipients to fall for phishing scams

Brian Krebs wrote: "More than a week after it said most people would be eligible to enroll in a free year of its TrustedID identity theft monitoring service, big three consumer credit ...
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Massive Spam Campaigns Push New Locky Ransomware With Doubled Ransom

Bleepingcomputer posted: "Reports are coming in from multiple security researchers and security firms about increased activity from one of the groups spreading the Locky ransomware. These ...
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Nearly 1.5 Million New Phishing Sites Created Each Month

The September 2017 Webroot Quarterly Threat Trends Report showed that 1.385 million new, unique phishing sites are created each month, with a high of 2.3 million sites created in May. The ...
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This Ransomware Demands Nudes Instead of Bitcoin

Cyber extortion is a very profitable criminal business model. Now, as if it was inevitable, someone has added a new, perverse twist: demanding naked photographs instead of Bitcoin, ...
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You Need To See This, And It Will Make You Crap Your Pants

You and I know that your users are the weak link, things like ID10T and PEBKAC come to mind. But do you know how bad the problem really is? Some people like to bury their head in the sand ...
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Barracuda Advanced Technology Group Tracks 20 Million Ransomware Phishing Attack

Barracuda Advanced Technology Group says it’s tracking a ransomware threat that has so far spawned about 20 million phishing emails sent to unsuspecting users around the world in the last ...
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Aaaaand... You're fired (thanks to phishing)

The BBC has a cautionary tale for pretty much everyone who uses email. It’s the story of a finance director who was sacked after falling for a phishing scam disguised as a message from ...
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Forbes Technology Group: Training Your Employees Ranks #2 In Preventing Ransomware Attacks

Forbes wrote a great article about protecting your organization against ransomware. Despite all the funds spent on state-of-the-art security software, the bad guys are always just one ...
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Phishing attacks use undocumented MS Office feature to leak system profile data

An undocumented Microsoft Office feature allows attackers to gather sensitive configuration details on targeted systems simply by sending a phishing email and social engineering victims ...
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The CCleaner app, designed for good cyber hygiene, was itself infected with a backdoor by hackers

Cisco's TALOS security researchers discovered a devious way to infect millions of machines. They said: "Supply chain attacks are a very effective way to distribute malicious software into ...
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This Week's Five Most Popular HackBusters Posts Sept 16

There is an enormous amount of noise in the security space, so how do you know what people really talk about and think is the most important topic? Well, we created the Hackbusters site ...
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