KnowBe4 Blog

Social Engineering

Latest social engineering news, analysis, tactics the bad guys are using and what you can do to defend your organization.

CEO Fraud Overtakes Ransomware And Data Breaches In EMEA Cyber-insurance Claims

CEO Fraud—also known as Business Email Compromise—related cyber-insurance claims accounted for nearly a quarter of all claims in the EMEA region, AIG said.

Phishing Scheme Gains Entry To Oregon Judicial Department Emails

Aubrey Wieber at the DemocratHerald reported: "A phishing scheme succeeded in breaking into the email accounts of five Oregon Judicial Department employees, exposing personal information ...

AI Used For Social Engineering. Fraudsters Mimic CEO’s Voice in Unusual Cybercrime Case | WSJ

Catherine Stupp at the Wall Street Journal reported on something we have predicted would happen in this blog. The article started out with:

Why Are Insurance Companies Insisting To Pay Ransom For Ransomware Attacks?

This week, ProPublica published a report describing how insurance companies now prefer to fork over hundreds of thousands of dollars / pounds / Euros in ransom to minimize the detriment ...

Financial Phishing Campaigns on the Rise

More than 1900 new potential bank phishing sites were registered in the first half of 2019, according to researchers at NormShield. Based on the increase in new suspicious domains ...

Business Detections of Ransomware Attacks Have Grown by 365%

The latest data from Malwarebyte’s report Cybercrime Tactics and Techniques: Ransomware Retrospective shows businesses are at risk of ransomware attack now more than ever.

Microsoft, PayPal, and Facebook are the Top Three Impersonated Brands

Back in June, we discussed Vade Secure’s “Phisher’s Favorite” report for Q1 2019, which found that Microsoft had been the most impersonated brand used in phishing attacks for four ...

Bogus Suicide Prevention as a Scam

A lowlife Colorado bail bondsman named Matthew Marre repeatedly posed as a law enforcement officer to trick T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon into giving him GPS data for his targets’ phones, ...

Even ‘Unsubscribe’ Emails Can Put the Organization at Risk

Social Engineering tactics seek to use any means that’s familiar to the intended victim – and unsubscribing is perceived as being so benign, it may just be the perfect way to fool your ...

Social Engineering Used To Establish Shady Bulletproof Hosting

Brian Krebs has reported that a dubious Internet provider, “Resnet,” was renting out tens of thousands of residential IP addresses to be used as proxies by fraudsters and spammers. ...