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How Threat Actors are Abusing Coronavirus Uncertainty

By this time, most everyone in the world has heard about COVID-19, a global outbreak that is commonly referred to as the Coronavirus. With growing fear and a lack of information, the stock markets have dropped to lows we haven't seen in years, and organizations everywhere are putting together contingency plans. Like most global events, this scenario creates a perfect opportunity for threat actors...
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Evasion Techniques: Geoblocking by IP

In order to increase the lifespan of their campaigns, most threat actors implement evasion techniques to keep their activity from being detected by defenders and their intelligence tools. In this blog post, we'll take a look at how geoblocking by IP is used. Geoblocking by IP takes advantage of the victim's location. It is often used on sites hosting malicious content to limit the exposure...
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Social Media Phishing: Beyond Credential Theft

In the past few weeks, our team highlighted how social media is abused by threat actors seeking to steal credentials and to administer phishing attacks. While these are both two of the most prominent cybersecurity threats distributed through social media, there are some other tactics in play, too.This week we're going to take a closer look into some of the other threats that are distributed on,...
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Take Social Media Account Takeover as Seriously as a BEC Attack

Social media account compromise isn't new, but it is evolving, fast. If you’ve never had an account hacked, chances are you know someone who has. And the numbers paint a troubling picture:29% of U.S. adults reported experiencing at least one social media account hack.57% of social media logins in 2025 were flagged as suspicious or fraudulent.Yet, many still shrug it off: “I’ll just reset my...
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SIM Swap Attacks are making SMS Two-Factor Authentication Obsolete

On August 30, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey became the most notable victim of one of the fastest-growing cyber threats: SIM Swapping. SIM Swap Attacks are increasing because they only require social engineering and access to a SIM card, which makes it another form of phishing.You can find our definition of phishing here. In a few words, it isn't that difficult.What is SIM Swapping?SIM swapping is a...
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New Webinar: Inside the World of Social Media Phishing: Financial Scams

On a daily basis, most people will use some form of social media. From checking photos of your friends and pets, to communicating with coworkers and loved ones, social media is a large part of the connected world.Unfortunately, this also means that the more social media is used, the more likely that threat actors will try to exploit it. Join us on February 6, at 3 PM ET, as we discuss how social...
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Threat Actor Abuses Mobile Sensor to Evade Detection

Every day our teams analyze millions of phish across the web, detected through emails, social media, text messages, and most other common digital vectors. Many phishing sites are easy to review and analyze. However, some threat actors that we track take steps to hide their attacks from people other than their intended victims. This is a defense mechanism that makes it harder to analyze their...
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Beyond Marketing: Getting Ahead of Brand Protection Issues

Today's marketing organization uses countless SaaS-based tools and platforms that live outside of an organization's network. As their digital footprint grows, so does their potential for digital risks targeting their enterprise, brands, and customers. Even if they don't join the latest social media platform, in most cases there are not proper online brand protections in place to ensure...
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How to Handle Brand Impersonation on Social Media

Social media is a powerful tool for modern organizations. It amplifies their message, promotes products and services, and fosters direct connections with customers. But alongside these benefits comes a growing risk: it also offers threat actors an easy way to exploit brand trust, damage reputations, and launch cyberattacks targeting loyal followers.What is Social Media Brand Impersonation?For the...
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Unique Countermeasures in Active Phishing Campaign Avoids Security Tools

PhishLabs' Email Incident Response analysts recently identified a phishing campaign leveraging novel tactics in the ongoing war between threat actors and security teams. In addition to presenting a unique twist on a popular lure theme, the campaign leverages a clever combination of tactics by attackers attempting to defeat email security technologies to great effectiveness.PhishLabs observed this...
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Active TrickBot Campaign Observed Abusing SendGrid and Google Docs

PhishLabs has observed an active TrickBot campaign targeting the employees of multiple organizations. Trickbot is a sophisticated successor of the Dyre Banking Trojan. It uses an intricate network of command and control servers (C2), web injects, and customized redirection attacks that leverage HTML or JavaScript injections to target numerous financial institutions across many geographies and...
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Marketing Teams Are Not Equipped to Monitor Social Media Threats

Every second, 5,787 tweets are published. Every minute, 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. These are just two of the more popular social networks, and among these data points are the occasional references to a specific organization, its brands, and even customers or employees.For many, these brands have a marketing, communications, or even customer service team dedicated to interacting...
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Active Office 365 Credential Theft Phishing Campaign Targeting Admin Credentials

PhishLabs has detected attempts to compromise Microsoft Office 365 administrator accounts as part of a broad phishing campaign. In the campaign, the threat actor(s) delivered a phishing lure that impersonated Microsoft and their Office 365 brand but came from multiple validated domains - an educational institution for example - not belonging to Microsoft. If the victim clicked the link, they...
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APWG: Two-Thirds of all Phishing Sites Used SSL protection in Q3

This week, APWG released its findings from Q3 that compiles insights from their member companies and provides an analysis of how phishing is changing. The key findings from the latest report show that phishing attacks continued to rise throughout the year, 40% of BEC attacks involve domains registered by the threat actor, and now more than two-thirds of all phishing sites are using SSL certs or...
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Social Media Account Takeover is as Vicious as a BEC Attack

At the height of social media adoption, users willingly shared everything from the lunch they just ate to the exact places they visited throughout the day. While some of this has been reduced as consumers learned how sharing private information could impact their privacy, many people still hide these kinds of updates behind basic security controls. This is just one of the reasons that a flurry of...
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Recap: How to Proactively Protect Users with Email Incident Response

This year organizations are estimated to have spent more than $124 billion on security, yet phishing attacks continue to bypass email security technology. Is it possible to proactively stop threats that would otherwise make it past your infrastructure? If you attended our most recent webinar, you know the answer is yes. Before we get into the how, our host and Director of Product Management,...
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Best Practices for Defanging Social Media Phishing Attacks

Social media-based phishing attacks have taken off in a big way. According to some estimates, social media now accounts for as much as 5% of all phishing attacks globally. When you consider that phishing volume has grown consistently every year for more than a decade (up 40% last year alone), that 5% constitutes a lot of attacks. This increase is no coincidence. Social media phishing attacks...
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More Bees with Honey? Reinforcement vs. Punishment in a Security Training Program

Ambassadors of security training programs often struggle with the most effective way to drive success. The ultimate purpose of these programs is to change employee behavior and create a more secure organization. Put simply, behavior is influenced by either reinforcement (i.e., encouraging employees to perform behaviors that we like) or punishment (i.e., discouraging employees from performing...
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Beware of Account Takeover

One way to verify if an email is legitimate is to look at the sender's address, the actual sender's address, not just the sender's name. One tactic cyber criminals employ is using the sender's name to trick the recipients. The cyber criminal may use a known acquaintance's name or the name of a legitimate company they are trying to spoof. This sounds sophisticated, but it is easy to catch when...
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Grease the Skids: Improve Training Successes by Optimizing the Environment

You have carefully selected a training program. Employees are completing the courses. And yet, they are not reporting suspicious emails and their passwords are made up of favorite sports teams and graduation dates. What is missing? Research shows that implementing training alone, as good as it may be, is not enough. We have learned that the transfer of new knowledge and behaviors on-the-job is...