Security Awareness Training Blog

Social Engineering Blog

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

The Top Lesson From The Recent Louisiana 2,000-server Ransomware Infection: "User Education, User Education, User Education"

Louisiana suffered a ransomware attack last week that took down more than two thousand of the state’s computers and servers. The ransomware apparently entered the network after a user ...
Continue Reading

Google Sent 12K Nation-State Phishing Warnings In Three Months

Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) delivered thousands of alerts of government-backed attempts to spearphish gmail users over just a three-month period earlier this year, they reported.
Continue Reading

Phishing Simulations Should be Educational, not Punitive

Phishing training programs need to be focused on educating employees rather than on shaming them, according to David Spark and Allan Alford, co-hosts of the Defense in Depth podcast. On ...
Continue Reading

Waterloo Brewing loses $2.1 million in social engineering cyberattack

Waterloo Brewing Ltd. says it has lost $2.1 million in what it calls a social engineering cyberattack. The Ontario brewery says the incident occurred in early November and involved the ...
Continue Reading

[Heads-up. This Is Ugly] After Refusing The Maze Ransomware Payment, Their Stolen Data Was Leaked

After a deadline was missed for receiving a ransom payment, the group behind Maze Ransomware has published almost 700 MB worth of data and files stolen from a security staffing firm. Our ...
Continue Reading

A massive international email scam netted $3 million worth of top-secret US military equipment

In a recent case first reported by Quartz, a crew of international cyber criminals allegedly convinced an unidentified US defense contractor to send them millions of dollars worth of ...
Continue Reading

It's Happening The World Over: $300K Lost To Phone Scammer

A woman in Singapore lost $300,000 to a scammer posing as a Singtel customer service employee, according to the Straits Times. The scammer told the victim he would fix some problems with ...
Continue Reading

An Australian Watering Hole (but in Canberra, not the Outback)

The Australian Federal Parliament suffered a malware infection earlier this year after some users fell victim to a watering hole attack, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) ...
Continue Reading

Cybercriminal Gang, Silent Starling, Creates New ‘Vendor Email Compromise’ Category

New attacks focus on organizations with global supply chains looking to trick a supplier’s customers into paying fake invoices and have already impacted 500 organizations worldwide.
Continue Reading

Malware Delivered Via Fake Browser Updates Are Back and are More Sophisticated Than Ever

Leveraging vulnerable website content management platforms, these attacks seek to trick users into installing malware under the guise that their web browser is out-of-date.
Continue Reading

Now HERE is an interesting Phishing Campaign!

It's a phishing campaign against phishing campaigns! :-D It's a public service program that educates organizations and societies globally on the greatest cyber risk of all - the falsehood ...
Continue Reading

Ransomware Attack Hits Louisiana State Servers

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards on Monday revealed that a ransomware attack hit state servers, prompting a response from the state’s cyber-security team. The incident appears to have ...
Continue Reading

A Look at Election Influence And Social Engineering

Attempts to influence elections are by no means new, but highly targeted online advertising requires people to think about social engineering in the form of political messaging in a new ...
Continue Reading

Real Estate Scams Have Gone Global. Bad Guys Caused Tens of Thousands of Dollars Damage Down Under

Scammers hijacked a total of $70,000 by imitating an Australian settlement agent’s email address, and then tricking two property buyers into sending the money to the wrong account, Perth ...
Continue Reading

[Heads-Up] Scam Of The Week: Thousands Of Hacked Disney+ Accounts Are Already For Sale On Criminal Sites

Apart from me, guess who has been anticipating the Disney+ channel?
Continue Reading

A Majority of Organizations Experience Breaches Despite a Majority Saying They Are Prepared to Defend Against Them

The mismatch of signals by IT organizations shows a potential overestimation on IT’s part about its ability to prevent and protect against new cyberthreats.
Continue Reading

[Heads Up] This New, Unusual Ransomware Strain Goes Exclusively After Servers

Danny Palmer at ZDnet alerted on the following: "An unconventional form of ransomware is being deployed in targeted attacks against enterprise servers – and it appears to have links to ...
Continue Reading

TrickBot Malware Uses Highly Personalized Fake Sexual Harassment Complaints as Phishing Bait

Fake sexual harassment complaints appearing to come from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) are the latest baits used by attackers to disseminate TrickBot banking ...
Continue Reading

People Need to Work Together to Spot Con Artists

It might not be possible to resist a good con artist, according to award-winning author, journalist, and champion poker player Maria Konnikova. On the CyberWire’s Hacking Humans podcast, ...
Continue Reading

Phishing Resistance for Charities

81% of charities say they’ve been targeted by a phishing attack this year, according to Ed Macnair, writing for UK Fundraising. Meanwhile, only 37% of charities think their IT and ...
Continue Reading

Get the latest about social engineering

Subscribe to CyberheistNews