Open Subtitles breach: The dangers of password reuse

Popular website Open Subtitles has been breached. The impact so far: almost seven million accounts “breached and ransomed” back in August. New breach: Open Subtitles had almost 7M accounts breached and ransomed in Aug. Data included email and IP addresses, usernames and unsalted MD5 password...

North Korean Hackers Start New Year with Attacks on Russian Foreign Ministry

A North Korean cyberespionage group named Konni has been linked to a series of targeted attacks aimed at the Russian Federation's Ministry of Foreign Affairs MID with New Year lures to compromise Windows systems with malware. "This activity cluster demonstrates the patient and persistent nature o...

Spear phish, whale phish, regular phish: What’s the difference?

There are many types of phishing attack nowadays, to the extent it can be tricky to keep up with them all. We have unique names for mobile attacks, postal attacks, threats sent via SMS and many more besides. However, we often see folks mix up their spears and their whales, and even occasionally...

Threat from Organized Cybercrime Syndicates Is Rising

From encrypting communications to fencing ill-gotten gains on underground sites, organized crime is cashing in on the digital revolution. The latest organized crime threat assessment from Europol issues a dire warning about the corrosive effect the rising influence of criminal syndicates is havin...

Tiny Font Size Fools Email Filters in BEC Phishing

A new business email compromise BEC campaign targeting Microsoft 365 users is using a range of sophisticated obfuscation tactics within phishing emails that can fool natural language processing filters and are undetectable to end users. Researchers at Avanan, a CheckPoint company, first discovere...

A Guide to Doing Cyberintelligence on a Restricted Budget

For those in the industry, it comes as no surprise that many cybersecurity programs have been impacted by loss of revenue during the pandemic. From cutting tooling and feed budgets to reduction in staff, it’s been challenging at best. In a recent SANS 2021 survey, “Threat Hunting In Uncertain...

Analyzing Email Services Abused for Business Email Compromise

We analyzed five major types of email channels, and the techniques in keywords and domain names BEC actors use to appear legitimate to potential victims...

Airline Credential-Theft Takes Off in Widening Campaign

A two-year-old espionage campaign against the airline industry is ongoing, with AsyncRAT and other commodity remote-access trojans RATs helping those efforts take flight. The campaign can effectively be a bird strike to the business engine, so to speak, resulting in data theft, financial fraud or...

ACSC Releases Annual Cyber Threat Report

The Australian Cyber Security Centre ACSC has released its annual report on key cyber security threats and trends for the 2020–21 financial year. The report lists the exploitation of the pandemic environment, the disruption of essential services and critical infrastructure, ransomware, the rapid...

Gift Card Gang Extracts Cash From 100k Inboxes Daily

Some of the most successful and lucrative online scams employ a "low-and-slow" approach -- avoiding detection or interference from researchers and law enforcement agencies by stealing small bits of cash from many people over an extended period. Heres the story of a cybercrime group that compromis...

Cybercrime Group Asking Insiders for Help in Planting Ransomware

A Nigerian threat actor has been observed attempting to recruit employees by offering them to pay $1 million in bitcoins to deploy Black Kingdom ransomware on companies' networks as part of an insider threat scheme. "The sender tells the employee that if they're able to deploy ransomware on a...

Wanted: Disgruntled Employees to Deploy Ransomware

Criminal hackers will try almost anything to get inside a profitable enterprise and secure a million-dollar payday from a ransomware infection. Apparently now that includes emailing employees directly and asking them to unleash the malware inside their employers network in exchange for a percenta...

Spear-phishing now targets employees outside the finance and executive teams, report says

Social engineering attacks have been a longstanding concern for both individuals and organizations alike. The trend, as we know it, is that fraudsters conducting spear phishing attacks—specifically, business email compromise BEC—are likely to target employees either in the finance or executive...

Threat Source newsletter (July 29, 2021)

Newsletter compiled by Jon Munshaw.Good afternoon, Talos readers. Thanks to everyone who joined us live yesterday for our talk on business email compromise. If you missed us live, the recording is up on our YouTube page now. Nick Biasini from Talos Outreach provided some great advice on... This i...

Best Practices to Thwart Business Email Compromise (BEC) Attacks

Business email compromise BEC refers to all types of email attacks that do not have payloads. Although there are numerous types, there are essentially two main mechanisms through which attackers penetrate organizations utilizing BEC techniques, spoofing and account take-over attacks. In a recent...

New Bug Could Let Attackers Hijack Zimbra Server by Sending Malicious Email

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered multiple security vulnerabilities in Zimbra email collaboration software that could be potentially exploited to compromise email accounts by sending a malicious message and even achieve a full takeover of the mail server when hosted on a cloud...

Talos Takes Ep: #62: Don't sleep on business email compromise

By Jon Munshaw. The latest episode of Talos Takes is available now. Download this episode and subscribe to Talos Takes using the buttons below, or visit the Talos Takes page. Business email compromise may seem like last decade’s threat, but it’s still just as prevalent as ever. A recent FBI... Th...

Threat Source newsletter (June 24, 2021)

Newsletter compiled by Jon Munshaw.Good afternoon, Talos readers. Even though spam emails asking for gift cards may seem like the oldest trick in the book, they're still effective in 2021. The FBI estimates that business email compromise cost victims around $1.8 billion in 2020,... This is only t...

Microsoft Disrupts Large, Cloud-Based BEC Campaign

Threat hunters at Microsoft recently uncovered and disrupted infrastructure that powered a large-scale business email compromise BEC campaign. The infrastructure was hosted on multiple cloud platforms, which allowed it to stay under the radar for quite some time. “The attackers performed discrete...

Microsoft Teams: Very Bad Tabs Could Have Led to BEC

Attackers could have stepped through a yawning security hole in Microsoft Teams chat service that would have let them masquerade as a targeted company’s employee by reading and sending email on their behalf. On Monday, Tenable’s Evan Grant explained in a post that he found the bug in Microsoft...