One of our Digital Risk Protection service customers, LastPass, is committed to monitoring the cyber threat environment to keep our customers as secure as possible. To highlight this commitment, we want to call attention to recent joint efforts to disrupt a phishing campaign targeting LastPass customers and associates that began two weeks ago. We are sharing this with you not because it is a new...

In Q2, phishing attacks targeting social media platforms increased more than 23%, according to Fortra’s PhishLabs. This is the greatest volume of attacks on social media in two years and puts the industry ahead of historically top targeted financial institutions. Every quarter, Fortra’s PhishLabs examines hundreds of thousands of phishing attacks targeting enterprises and their brands. In this...

The latest Verizon Data Breach Investigations report indicates that over 70% of data breaches involved the human element. Cybercriminals exploit people to trick them into clicking unsafe links, opening malicious attachments, entering their credentials into bogus login pages, sharing sensitive data, and authorizing fraudulent fund transfers. One area where many exploits take place is on social...

Email impersonation is the fastest growing and most successful means of bypassing email security controls. In Q4 2022, the response-based and credential theft attacks that make up email impersonation reached their highest percentage of share of all email threat volume, contributing to more than 97% of attacks reported by end users. In this series, we look at the top email impersonation threats...

Business email compromise (BEC) is a dangerous type of email spoofing that targets businesses, aiming to damage them in some way. Overall, BEC “is one of the most financially damaging online crimes,” according to a joint Cybersecurity Advisory by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Food and Drug Administration Office of Criminal Investigations (FDA OCI), and the US Department of...

Phishing sites impersonating reputable organizations continue to represent the top online threat to businesses and their brands. In Q4, Financial Institutions were targeted most by credential theft phish, experiencing the largest share of malicious sites recorded since 2021, according to Fortra’s PhishLabs. Within the group, criminals capitalized on the broad customer bases and recognizable names...

One of the most popular attack strategies used by criminals to mislead consumers into doing the wrong thing is phishing. Phishing can occur via text message (SMS or instant messaging apps, coined SMiShing), social media or via phone, but email-based attacks are the ones most often linked to the term. It's easy for phishing emails to reach millions of users at once and to blend in with the many...

Phishing is one of the most prevalent forms of cyberattack used by bad threat actors to either steal personal data, or to gain entrance into a business’ network. These surreptitious and malicious email messages trick unsuspecting recipients into clicking a link or opening an attachment that contains malware, ransomware, or in the case of Business Email Compromise (BEC) , employs impersonation...

In Q3, nearly 80% of threat actors opted to compromise existing websites or abuse free tools when staging phishing sites, according to the latest data from Fortra’s PhishLabs. While Compromised Sites represented the lion’s share of staging activity, URL Shorteners, Free Domain Registrations, and Developer Tools all experienced increased abuse in Q3 and pointed to sustained criminal interest in no...

In Q2, four out of five phishing sites were staged using infrastructure that required no investment on the part of threat actors, including Compromised Sites and Free Tools and Services, according to the Agari & PhishLabs Quarterly Threat Trends & Intelligence Report. Although the volume of Paid Domain Registrations associated with phishing sites grew slightly, threat actors continue to choose no...

In Q2, Response-Based attacks targeting corporate inboxes climbed to their highest volume since 2020, according to the latest Quarterly Threat Trends & Intelligence Report from Agari and PhishLabs . Response-Based threats such as Advanced-Fee Fraud, Business Email Compromise (BEC), and hybrid Vishing attacks all demonstrated increased volume in Q2, with Vishing specifically growing 625% over the...

Courtesy of Digital Guardian by Fortra Attackers continue to find clever new ways to disguise phishing emails. Here are 10 different ways you can identify a phishing email. While large-scale ransomware and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks may be taking up up the bulk of people’s cybersecurity news feeds, organizations have more to worry about than the newest and most sophisticated...

In this guest blog, Dr Ed Amoroso, CEO, Tag Cyber , provides a high-level overview of the Fortra cybersecurity portfolio value proposition based on a mapping of its component solution offerings to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) phases. Forty years ago, an engineer in Minnesota decided that computer costs for the IBM System/38 were getting too high. So, he began investigating and building...

Phishing site volume increased 28% over the course of 2021, according to PhishLabs Quarterly Threat Trends & Intelligence Report . Attacks last year displayed increasingly volatile behavior on a month-to-month basis, often intermixed with a variety of attack vectors. Despite a lack of congruency, phishing unequivocally remains the most dominant attack method targeting organizations. Every quarter...

Phishing attacks targeting consumers during 2021 have increased nearly 32% from 2020, according to PhishLabs’ Quarterly Threat Trends & Intelligence Report . While trends have been erratic, multiple spikes in activity continue to make phishing the most dominant attack method on the threat landscape. Threat actors are experimenting with a variety of tactics to target enterprises with these attacks...

Financial institutions have experienced a 15.3% increase in share in phishing attacks, according to PhishLabs’ Quarterly Threat Trends & Intelligence Report . This increase establishes financial services as the top targeted industry and shows threat actors continue to place high value on compromised banking credentials. In this post, we take a look at the tools and infrastructure used by threat...

To stage a phishing site, cybercriminals have several options. They can use a legitimate domain that has been compromised, they can abuse free hosting services, or they can register their own domain. Understanding the prevalence of each scenario is fundamental to detecting and mitigating these threats as early in the attack process as possible (including before they've been launched). PhishLabs...

Most phishing campaigns use social engineering and brand impersonation to attempt to take over accounts and trick the victim into divulging their credentials. PhishLabs has uncovered a previously unseen tactic by attackers that uses a malicious Microsoft Office 365 App to gain access to a victim's account without requiring them to give up their credentials to the attackers. In this technique, the...

The life of a phishing site is brief, but impactful. A study published earlier this year found the average time span between the first and last victim of a phishing attack is just 21 hours. The same study observed the average phishing site shows up in industry blocklist feeds nearly 9 hours after the first victim visit. By that time, most of the damage is done. Blocklists are an important part of...

Widely-used URL tracking systems are often abused in phishing attacks. The domains used by these systems are commonly known and trusted, making them attractive carriers for phishing URLs. To illustrate how it works, this post breaks down a recently-observed phishing attack that uses Google Ads' tracking system to evade email filters. How it works Piggybacking on a domain is appealing to threat...