Security Awareness Training Blog

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

I was interviewed by DARKReading at BlackHat [VIDEO]

While at BlackHat, the editorial team from DARKReading wanted to know more about what we were doing at KnowBe4. This was a fun, relaxed 15 minutes where we chatted about problems like ...
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The Ultimate Pop-up Phishing Warning Message

'Just weeks after she started preparing opposition research files on Donald Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort last spring, Democratic National Committee consultant Alexandra Chalupa ...
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PokemonGo Ransomware installs Backdoor Account and Spreads to other Drives

With the popularity of PokemonGo, it was inevitable that a malware developer would create a ransomware that impersonates it. This is the case with a new Hidden-Tear ransomware discovered ...
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Hitler ransomware just deletes files instead of encrypting them

Security experts detected and analyzed a new threat, the Hitler ransomware, that doesn’t encrypt files but simply deletes them. Larry Abrams at Bleepingcomputer commented: " It looks like ...
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Scam Of The Week: New Social Security Account Fraud

Bad guys are abusing the Social Security Administration's (SSA) online service called My SocialSecurity Account in two ways: A phishing scam which encourages employees to create an ...
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July 2016 Ransomware Roundup: New Strains And New Nasty Features

The ransomware market is rapidly maturing, we start seeing upgraded strains and rebranded versions sold cheaply in the Dark Web. And mainstream media have finally glommed on after years ...
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When the Bad Guys Go to Ransomware B-School

By Eric Howes, KnowBe4 Principal Lab Researcher. As we have documented numerous times in this space over the past few years, the bad guys have proven to be relentless innovators, ...
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The Latest from Black Hat 2016: Ransomware By the Numbers

The annual Black Hat security conference always produces a wealth of interesting papers, presentations, talks, live demos, and security news. This year's Black Hat USA 2016 event, which ...
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Yes, that email is really from Paypal. And, yes, it's really malicious.

Score another one for the bad guys, who have yet again demonstrated their seemingly inexhaustible ability to concoct new methods to exploit legitimate services in order to bypass existing ...
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First Half 2016 Top 10 Phone Scams Revealed

You may not have heard of Atlanta-based Pindrop Labs. They have developed an innovative way to detect fraudulent phone calls called a "phone print", and their solutions reduce fraud ...
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New KnowBe4 Phishing Templates: A Summary 7/30/2016

Over the past few weeks our Phishing Templates Mistress Katie and her team have added 17 new templates for use by customers in their simulated phishing campaigns.
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Scam Of The Week: Illegal Game of Thrones Download

Illegally downloading television shows and movies from a variety of torrent websites is done all the time. The HBO series, "Game of Thrones" is the #1 downloaded, not surprisingly. This ...
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New Ransomware-as-a-Service Offering Goes Live

The cybermafia behind the Petya/Mischa ransomware just launched their RaaS offering July 25th. It pays "distributors" a part of the ransom that gets extorted from victims and increases ...
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Cyber Attack Maps...Accurate Or Just Eye Candy?

Here are the top 5 Cyber Attack Maps found in Google. They all seem to show the cyber attacks in a slightly different perspective. This is the Norse attack map as an example:
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Why does Kevin Mitnick recommend 20+ character passwords?

The background is based on current state-of-the-art password cracking technology. In short, hackers penetrate the network, get access to a domain controller and pull the file with all ...
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Scam Of The Week: RNC Attendees Get Hacked Through Fake Wi-Fi Networks

The PR people at Avast decided to have some fun and created a series of fake Wi-Fi networks at various locations around the Republican National Congress in Cleveland. Avast’s team set up ...
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