Romance, BEC Scams Lands Soldier in Jail for 46 Months

A former Army reservist was just sentenced to 46 months in prison and ordered to pay nearly $2 million in penalties and restitution, after pleading guilty to scamming dozens of people online, including the elderly and a veteran’s organization for Marines. Joseph Iorhemba Asan Jr. along with his...

BEC Scammers Seek Native English Speakers on Underground

Looking for work? Speak fluent English? Capable of convincingly portraying a professional – as in, somebody a highly ranked corporate leader would talk to? If you lack scruples and disregard those pesky things called “laws,” it could be your lucky day: Cybercrooks are putting up help-wanted ads,...

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...

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...

Judge drops hammer, dishes 7 years slammer for BEC and romance scammer

A Texas resident has finally paid the price for a heady mix of malicious mail antics. A combination of business email compromise BEC scams and romance fakeouts bagged them $2.2 million across roughly 6 years. This is quite a divergent portfolio of scamming activity. You may typically assume BEC...

A week in security (June 21 – June 27)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Want to stop ransomware attacks? Send the cybercriminals to jail, says Brian Honan: Lock and Code S02E11 Atomic research institute breached via VPN vulnerability Hotel staff bust Hermes SMS scammer with suspiciously large number of cables City of Liège hit by...

Attackers in Executive Clothing - BEC continues to separate orgs from their money

By Nick Biasini. In today's world of threat research, the focus tends to be on the overtly malicious practice of distributing and installing malware on end systems. But this is far from the complete picture of what threats organizations face. One of the most, if not the most, costly is something...

BEC Losses Top $1.8B as Tactics Evolve

Business email compromise BEC attacks ramped up significantly in 2020, with more than $1.8 billion stolen from organizations with these types of attacks last year alone — and things are getting worse. BEC attacks are carried out by cybercriminals either impersonating someone inside an organizatio...

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...

Microsoft Teams: Very Bad Tabs Could Have Led to BEC

Attackers could have stepped through a yawning security hole in the 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 Microso...

Behind the scenes of business email compromise: Using cross-domain threat data to disrupt a large BEC campaign

Microsoft 365 Defender researchers recently uncovered and disrupted a large-scale business email compromise BEC infrastructure hosted in multiple web services. Attackers used this cloud-based infrastructure to compromise mailboxes via phishing and add forwarding rules, enabling these attackers to...

Business email compromise campaign targets wide range of orgs with gift card scam

Cybercriminals continue to target businesses to trick recipients into approving payments, transferring funds, or, in this case, purchasing gift cards. This kind of email attack is called business email compromise BEC—a damaging form of phishing designed to gain access to critical business...

Business email compromise campaign targets wide range of orgs with gift card scam

Cybercriminals continue to target businesses to trick recipients into approving payments, transferring funds, or, in this case, purchasing gift cards. This kind of email attack is called business email compromise BEC—a damaging form of phishing designed to gain access to critical business...

Business email compromise: How Microsoft is combating this costly threat

Amongst all cybercrime, phishing attacks continue to be the most prevalent today. With over 90 percent of attacks coming via email, it’s important that every organization has a plan to prevent these threats from reaching users. At Microsoft, we’re passionate about providing our customers with...

Business email compromise: How Microsoft is combating this costly threat

Amongst all cybercrime, phishing attacks continue to be the most prevalent today. With over 90 percent of attacks coming via email, it’s important that every organization has a plan to prevent these threats from reaching users. At Microsoft, we’re passionate about providing our customers with...

How to Test and Improve Your Domain's Email Security?

No matter which type of business you are in, whether small, medium, or large, email has become an irrefutable tool for communicating with your employees, partners, and customers. Emails are sent and received each day in bulk by companies from various sources. In addition, organizations may also...

Protect your business from email phishing with multi-factor authentication

Cybersecurity has been in the news far more often in the past 12 months than in previous years, as cybercriminals escalated their activity during the COVID-19 pandemic quarantine. The seismic shift of hundreds of millions of people connecting and working from home every day presented cybercrimina...

Protect your business from email phishing with multi-factor authentication

Cybersecurity has been in the news far more often in the past 12 months than in previous years, as cybercriminals escalated their activity during the COVID-19 pandemic quarantine. The seismic shift of hundreds of millions of people connecting and working from home every day presented cybercrimina...

Doxing in the corporate sector

Introduction Doxing refers to the collection of confidential information about a person without their consent for the purpose of inflicting harm on that person or to otherwise gain some benefit from gathering or disclosing such information. Normally, doxing involves a threat to specific people,...