The risk of a user receiving a phishing attack is higher than ever, and technological solutions often miss the most devastating of them. Though technology is both an important and required component in protecting the enterprise, security teams need to remain vigilant and educated on quickly identifying threats which make it past technology. This includes the latest social engineering techniques...

Each year new phishing techniques result in more attacks successfully landing in user inboxes. In most cases, threat actors are no different than anyone else, and follow the hottest trends in an effort to be more relevant. During tax season they may push out tax scams, during elections they may push bogus political-inspired healthcare emails, and there are even Game of Thrones inspired attacks...

The United States is once again, and for the foreseeable future, the most targeted country by threat actors' phishing attacks. Making up an astonishing 84% of all phishing volume, the U.S. saw a single percent decline from 85% last year. But... While this sounds like a positive, the number of attacks went up by more than 60,000 in 2018. By comparison, the number of attacks in 2017 only went up by...

In this year's annual Phishing Trends and Intelligence report we identified phishing sites targeting more than 1,200 different brands belonging to 773 parent institutions. Of the top five targeted industries, they accounted for 83.9% of total phishing volume. There are two big takeaways from this finding: financial institutions are back on top, and each industry is still at risk. Through our...

Back in the olden days of the internet, when AOL's dial-up connection still made horrible sounds prior to getting you access to your inbox, phishing attacks were born. Somewhere in the mid-1990s, internet-based social engineering attacks were born and designed to capture credentials on AOL by way of a program called AOHell, and expanded on to stealing credit card numbers or other private accounts...

There are all sorts of things that end up in your inbox, but among those that are reported to a SOC or security team, malicious content only makes up a small percent. Among the analysis provided in this year's annual Phishing Trends and Intelligence (PTI) report, we added a new section based on data from our Phishing Incident Response team. The data analysis resulted in a detailed breakdown of the...

Phishing has and will continue to be a threat to anyone connected to the web. This is a fact set in stone, and regardless of advancements in technology, social engineering will allow these attacks to continue to be successful. Today, we are releasing our latest version of the annual Phishing Trends and Intelligence report. Using data collected from millions of social engineering attacks spanning...

Recently, our Director of Product Management, Cary Hudgins, discussed how to develop a digital risk protection plan for the modern enterprise. One of the many reasons why such a plan should be created is because, in today's world, an enterprise organization's digital footprint can be vast and will continue to grow. Take for example the average employee who receives an average of 90 emails per day...

Taking Advantage of Our Tendency to Simplify There's an old joke floating around the Internet that claims NASA, upon discovering that standard ballpoint pens would not work in space, invested millions of dollars and years of R&D. The resulting pen was supposedly capable of writing in zero-G, on any surface, and in temperatures that would surely kill any astronaut. When confronted with the same...

In May of 2018, we reported on three Romanian threat actors who were extradited to the U.S. for their involvement in a SMiShing and Vishing fraud scheme. At the time of reporting, the expected losses were listed around $18 million but have since risen to more than $21 million. Between July 12 and October 31, 2011, PhishLabs' analysts detected a number of telephone phishing (known as vishing)...

It's time to take action against phish! Phishing attacks are no longer few and far between, they are the norm. Regardless of your company's investments in filtering technologies and countermeasures, suspicious and malicious emails make it into employee inboxes. It only takes one to cost your company time, money, and lost reputation. Unfortunately, even with traditional security awareness training...

We've previously reported on how, due to the rise in phishing attempts leveraging SSL certificates, the icon in your web browser gives your users a false sense of security. The threat, however, doesn't end with your web browser. Although first observed as early as 2016, PhishLabs analysts have observed a dramatic uptick in the imitation of flags, banners, and other markup used by applications to...

You are affected by social engineering tactics every day. Okay, let me explain. From an information security standpoint, Wikipedia says that social engineering is the psychological manipulation of people into performing actions or divulging confidential information [1] . That's true, but social engineering isn't limited to information security; it's something we all experience, every day. In most...

Phishing attacks are supposed to be visible. If you can't see them, how could anyone possibly fall for them? Since the dawning of time for phishing attacks there has been a constant struggle between the threat actors creating phishing sites and the individuals and organizations combating them. This has caused phishing attacks to evolve in to more complicated and stealthy traps over time. Phishing...

Healthcare data breaches are among the most costly of any industry, and phishing attacks are the number one cause. Security technologies, while essential, are not enough to mitigate the threat posed by phishing. Over 90 percent of data breaches contain a phishing component, and the average cost to remediate a data breach is $3.86 million. However, the silver lining is that with an effective...

We've recently noticed two significant changes in C2 tactics used by the threat actors behind BankBot Anubis, a mobile banking trojan. First is the use of Chinese characters to encode the C2 strings (in addition to base64 encoding). The second is the use of Telegram Messenger in addition to Twitter for communicating C2 URLs. Previously reported by PhishLabs , the criminals behind BankBot Anubis...

This month the largest recorded data dump in history, 87GB filled with passwords and user credentials, was made available. Dubbed Collection #1 consists of 1,160,253,228 unique combinations of email addresses and passwords. Though historic, there are two positive notes regarding this information: The first is that this data set was circulated on hacking forums back in December of 2018 and is...

It happens on a daily basis, it's even likely that at some point it happened to you: social media account takeovers. A quick Google search shows a new batch of celebrities, politicians, companies, and other high profile users becoming the victim of account takeovers on a weekly basis. It's concerning, it can cause a ruckus, and depending on what happened after the fact it can even cause damage to...

Since 2015 there has been a steady increase in threat actors' use of SSL certificates to add an air of legitimacy to malicious websites. By the end of 2017 almost a third of phishing sites had SSL certificates, meaning their URLs began with HTTPS:// and (most) browsers displayed the all-important padlock symbol. In recent months, however, our team has observed an even more dramatic increase in the...

Phishing simulations come with a range of emotions for the users who interact with them. Some will simply ignore them, others may fail by clicking on a link or attachment, and for the well-trained, they may even report them. Even if there is a negative outcome, training leads and organizations should not be worried, yet. Just like in school, these simulations are just that, simulations or quizzes...