Since the beginning of February, we have seen more than a 3,000% increase in Coronavirus-themed phishing attacks targeting our customers. The spike in attacks is as logical as it is repugnant. With an estimated 75 million employees more reliant than ever on email during the largest "work-from-home experiment" in history, phishing scammers and other threat actors seem hellbent on exploiting...

Hint: DMARC Alone Won't Cut It Think the prospect of cybercriminals using your domains to launch phishing attacks sounds bad for your brand? Just wait until you hear the latest on lookalike domains. Over the last few months, researchers have been discovering a troubling number of phishing sites that feature domains meant to impersonate leading brands in a variety of industries. Sometimes referred...

A growing body of evidence suggests employees throughout the healthcare sector may be uniquely vulnerable to phishing attacks. If finding itself a growing target for cybercriminals weren’t bad enough, the industry is also seeing associated lawsuits piling up. Montana-based Kalispell Regional Healthcare was recently hit with a suit after it disclosed that multiple employees had fallen victim to...

You’ve heard the statistics…more than 70% of all business users will be provisioned with cloud office applications in the next two years, including email. It’s an overdue modernization that eliminates physical infrastructure to drive cost savings and integrate services for improved productivity Chasing this move, cybercriminals intent on account takeover are evolving their tactics, targeting end...

Editor's Note: This post originally appeared on the Microsoft Security blog and has been republished here. You already know that email is the number one attack vector for cybercriminals. But what you might not know is that without a standard email security protocol called Domain Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance ( DMARC ), your organization is open to the phishing attacks that...

There is no denying that business email compromise (BEC) is big business, with losses exceeding a billion dollars in the United States in the last year alone. Globally, BEC attacks have cost more than $13 billion in the last five years. Chances are likely that you’ve probably been a recipient of one of these social-engineered emails yourself. But the question remains… who is behind these...

You likely have a fraudulent email from a business email compromise (BEC) scammer sitting in your inbox, and you may not realize it. However, recent research from the Agari Cyber Intelligence Division (ACID) has shown that these advanced phishing attacks increasingly possess a handful of commonalities, making them easier to spot—which is good news considering their popularity. There are more BEC...

This post originally appeared on the Armadillo Blog and has been lightly edited for clarity. Most organisations have been successful in blocking malicious emails targeted at their employees, at least to some extent. Various on-premise and cloud providers exist to take care of anti-spam, anti-virus, reputation scores, and advanced features such as sandboxing of executables. As a service provider...

According to a public service announcement issued by the FBI, college students across the United States continue to be targeted in a common email phishing scam that lures students in with the promise of employment. It works like this: email Scammers advertise phony job opportunities on college employment websites or students receive emails on their student accounts recruiting them for fictitious...

One of the things that often stumps even the most security conscious companies is knowing all the third-party email service providers they are working with. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible for these organizations to protect their customers from phishing attacks if they don’t even know who is sending legitimate email on their behalf. And this gets even more challenging when you...

Ask any security professional what the number one pain point is within their organization, and chances are they’ll say ‘user behavior’…with ‘malware’ coming in as a very close second. And while these issues are very different on the surface, they do have one thing in common: both are often the cause of high-profile data breaches, largely in part to the increased use of spear phishing email...

In the last five years, we’ve all become far too familiar with it – hackers spoofing a company’s domain and therefore tarnishing the brand, bad actors attempting to infect our computers with malware, and criminals sending millions of spam messages. As if this isn’t enough, now there is a whole group of people working to outsmart companies AND their customers by using cousin domains to fool...

In the second in our series of blogs on the Fundamentals of Phishing we will explore how to identify fraudulent emails. Not that long ago, phishing attempts were quite primitive and often full of errors, and it was easier for consumers to identify when something was amiss. In addition, consumers weren’t accessing their inboxes from multiple devices and mobiles, nor did they expect to receive...

This is the start of a new ongoing series for us that gives you the tips and tricks you need for successful DMARC deployment. What does "PermError SPF Permanent Error: Too many DNS lookups" mean? There are several safeguards put in place with SPF . One of these is a limitation of DNS lookups to help ensure that you do not have timeout issues. SPF will evaluate only 10 DNS mechanism lookups in an...

One of the great things about a conference like BlackHat is that it gives people like me the opportunity to take a step back, get out of the specific back alleyways of cybersecurity that we usually inhabit, and take a broader, more holistic look at attack and defense. One concept that's been talked about for a while is the Cyber Kill Chain. It takes a military-theoretical approach to network asset...

The Benefits of Monitor Mode When a technology exists that can tell you if and when your domains are being spoofed (and by who), why would you not use it?! What is DMARC? DMARC was created to address some fundamental problems with existing email authentication technologies (SPF and DKIM). It provides feedback about your email authentication implementation and gives ISPs (Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft...