What’s behind the recent rise in identity-based attacks? [Q&A]
Cybercriminals are increasingly using sophisticated identity-based attacks (phishing, social engineering, leveraging compromised credentials) to gain access as trusted users and move laterally across systems undetected.
We spoke to Cristian Rodriguez, field CTO, Americas at CrowdStrike, about the company’s recent research into these attacks and now organizations can defend against them.
IRONSCALES launches deepfake protection to combat social engineering attacks
Deepfake-driven social engineering attacks continue to gain momentum but technical solutions to the issue have so far been slow to emerge.
A recent study from IRONSCALES found that traditional Secure Email Gateways (SEGs) fail to stop an average of 67.5 phishing attacks per 100 mailboxes every month. The company is announcing the launch of a new product offering deepfake protection for enterprise email security.
Can humans provide a cybersecurity edge? [Q&A]
It's usually the case that cybersecurity is seen as being all about technology and that humans -- making mistakes and falling for social engineering -- are something of a liability.
But are people really just a problem or can they also be part of the solution? Toney Jennings, CEO of DataStone, believes we need to shift our thinking away from the current paradigm to empowering people as a hidden asset in the protection of their organization. We talked to him to find out more.
Chatbots can be tricked into revealing company secrets
A new Dark Side of GenAI report from Immersive Labs looks at 'prompt injection' attacks, in which individuals input specific instructions to trick chatbots into revealing sensitive information, potentially exposing organizations to data leaks.
Using data gathered from a public prompt injection challenge the report finds a worrying 88 percent of participants successfully tricked the GenAI bot into giving away sensitive information in at least one level of an increasingly difficult challenge.
21 percent of S&P 500 companies reported breaches in 2023
According to the latest threat research from SecurityScorecard, 21 percent of S&P 500 companies experienced breaches in 2023.
The report shows that 25 percent of these breaches impacted financial services and insurance companies. Financial institutions have some of the most robust security programs because they have substantial money and assets. But the interconnected nature of the financial sector means that compromising one institution or commonly used product can lead to broader impacts across the entire industry.
The top phishing themes of 2023
New research from Cofense reveals the most common phishing themes of last year, which offer insight into the threat actor's intentions.
Information analyzed to determine the theme includes the brand being spoofed, any attachment names, rendered attachments in the case of documents or HTML files, and the email body content, plus of course the subject.
Senior managers are more likely to click on phishing emails
Senior executives are 60 percent more likely to click on malicious links than their employees, making them a vulnerable target for hackers, according to a new report.
However, data from SoSafe also reveals that senior managers are more likely to report a suspicious email (20 percent) than employees (eight percent) are, which shows that security awareness among top management is rising.
How phishing scams have changed and how to protect against them [Q&A]
Cyberattacks and data breaches come it many forms, but often at the root of them is a phishing scam.
Exploiting the fact that humans are the weakest link in the security chain, cybercriminals use phishing to trick employees into giving up credentials or other sensitive information that can be used to gain a foothold to carry out a later attack.
Combating phishing and social engineering threats [Q&A]
The majority of cyberattacks are made possible by some degree of human error. Phishing emails and social engineering continue to dominate as the most common delivery systems for an attack.
We spoke to Mika Aalto, CEO and co-founder at Hoxhunt, about why a human-focused cyber-strategy is the key to success in combating attacks, about the initiatives that organizations can implement to establish this and how he expects human-related cyber-attacks to evolve.
Cyberattacks seek to exploit trust in Microsoft and Adobe tech brands
The first quarter of 2023 has seen a significant increase in cyberattacks looking to exploit trust in established tech brands like Microsoft and Adobe.
A new report from Avast also finds a 40 percent rise in the share of phishing and smishing attacks over the previous year. Overall, two out of three threats people encounter online now seek to use social engineering techniques, taking advantage of human weaknesses.
Novel social engineering attacks surge by 135 percent driven by generative AI
New research from cybersecurity AI company Darktrace shows a 135 percent increase in social engineering attacks using sophisticated linguistic techniques, including increased text volume, punctuation, and sentence length, and with no links or attachments.
This trend suggests that generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, are enabling threat actors to craft sophisticated and targeted attacks at speed and at scale.
Social engineering remains the top threat for enterprises
The latest Annual Trends Report from Jamf, based on a sample of 500,000 devices protected by the company's technology, looks at the threats impacting devices used in the modern workplace and finds social engineering tops the list.
The combination of an increasingly distributed workforce with the relative ease with which bad actors can carry out phishing campaigns, leads to the leakage of user credentials. In 2022, 31 percent of organizations had at least one user fall victim to a phishing attack.
Dealing with the threat of social engineering [Q&A]
Thanks to improved security technology, most cyberattacks now rely on some element of social engineering in order to exploit the weakest link, the human.
Phillip Wylie, hacker in residence at CyCognito, believes CISOs now need to take a step back and focus on the overall picture when it comes to security. This includes securing internal and external attack surfaces, and testing the security of these environments, as well as educating employees about the risks.
Almost half of organizations suffer voice network attacks
A new survey shows that 47 percent of organizations have experienced a vishing (voice phishing) or social engineering attack via their voice networks in the past year.
The study by voice traffic protection specialist Mutare also finds most are unaware of the volume of unwanted phone calls traversing their network, or the significance of threats lurking in unwanted traffic, which includes robocalls, spoof calls, scam calls, spam calls, spam storms, vishing, smishing and social engineering.
Socially engineered email attacks prove to be more effective
The latest quarterly threat report from Abnormal Security shows that increasingly sophisticated and novel socially engineered email attacks that bypass legacy defenses are driving 50 percent higher engagement than traditional email attacks such as credential phishing.
The report also shows that between the first week of July 2020 and the first week of April 2021, the percentage of companies across industries getting hit with vendor email compromise (VEC) attacks increased nearly 120 percent.
Recent Headlines
Most Commented Stories
BetaNews, your source for breaking tech news, reviews, and in-depth reporting since 1998.
Regional iGaming Content
© 1998-2025 BetaNews, Inc. All Rights Reserved. About Us - Privacy Policy - Cookie Policy - Sitemap.