Following the announcement today that £2m has already been lost to coronavirus related fraud and Google’s blocking of 18 million phishing emails, please find below some expert comment on these stories from cybersecurity firm FireEye.
ISBuzz Team
According to researchers, cybercriminals are adjusting their malvertising campaigns to adapt their malicious ads making them relevant to the COVID-19 crisis, including using website names appearing to host information related to the coronavirus. The campaign hosts an exploit kit called Fallout, which attempts to exploit vulnerabilities in older versions of Internet Explorer. They’re doing this without user action or awareness that anything is happening with the goal of installing Kpot v2.0, an information/password stealer.
In response to the news that GitHub users’ accounts are being stolen in an ongoing series of phishing attacks (link to GitHub alert: https://github.blog/2020-04-14-sawfish-phishing-campaign-targets-github-users/), Security experts offer perspective.
Based on research from Check Point published Thursday, Chris Rothe, co-founder and chief product officer at threat detection & response firm Red Canary commented below.
It has been reported that, in a joint research project, scientists from the Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security at Ruhr-Universität Bochum and from Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy have discovered a critical vulnerability is hidden in FPGAs’. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are flexibly programmable computer chips that are considered to be very secure components and are deployed in many applications. The team has called the security bug “Starbleed” and attackers can gain complete control over the chips and their functionalities via the vulnerability. Since the bug is integrated into the hardware, the security risk can only be…
AT&T Alien Labs recently conducted research into how webhooks in Slack can lead to some pretty convincing phishing attacks.
Following the news that tech company Wappalyzer has disclosed a security incident this week after a hacker began emailing its customers and offering to sell Wappalyzer’s database for $2,000, “If you receive this e-mail it’s because we get the full database of Wappalyzer, and your e-mail is on the database,” the hacker, going by the name of CyberMath, wrote in an email sent to Wappalyzer customers this week.
As the impact of COVID-19 leads cybercriminals away from attacking targets in the healthcare and retail sectors, it seems their attentions have been turned to financial institutions instead, according to threat researchers at Carbon Black. Cyber-attacks on banks and other financial institutions accounted for the majority (52%) of all attacks observed in March – up 38% from the figure recorded in February. The research tracked similarly sharp changes in the number of attacks recorded in the healthcare and retail sectors, with retail accounting for 31% of attacks in February, but just 1.6% in March.
IT leaders and managers are moving beyond business continuity, evaluating budget cuts and tighter spending controls to help weather the COVID-19 crisis and the economy’s certain tailspin. PwC recently released a survey revealing the financial measures top business leaders in the U.S. are evaluating to minimize and manage business impact. Unsurprisingly, more than half of PwC’s survey respondents (67%) are considering deferring or canceling planned investments. Of planned initiatives, 2% are considering cybersecurity and privacy budget cuts, while 53% are looking at reduced IT spend. Another 25% may scale back digital transformation initiatives, which is surprising given the number of businesses forced…
VentureBeat and ZDNet reported this afternoon that Google’s saying it blocked 18 million COVID-19 themed phishing emails last week. The blocked COVID-19 phishing emails targeting Gmail users represent about 2.5% of the 100 million phishing emails Google blocks daily. They also say they’re blocking 240 million COVID-related daily spam messages each day.