Archive for category: Security

Because of its relative wealth, our New England region is hard-hit by cyberattacks¹.

In this Feb. 2, 2023-recorded webinar Bryley VP Roy Pacitto brings examples Bryley’s encountered of Business Email Compromise (this is when names and addresses you trust are spoofed to get you to divulge information, sometimes, as Roy demonstrates, into transferring funds).

Bryley President Garin Livingstone shows steps you can take to protect your business from the rise in ransomware incidents … [one-hour, previously-recorded, Zoom seminar]

1 Request, 2 Follow-up, 3 Urgent, 4 Important

These are the top Email Subject lines in Business Email Compromise attacks, the costliest cyberattacks. There were 19,369 reported incidents at a loss of $1.8 billion in 2020, the most recent published data from the FBI.

A typical Business Email Compromise attack is the result of a credential breach. With stolen email credentials a crook poses as an established vendor, and uses this trusted position to ply company data or funds from you or a colleague. … [4 min. read]

Among the top headlines in Google News’s Technology section today was criminal hackers use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and its subset, ML (Machine Learning)¹. Opening the article, I found a synopsis of a Tech Republic report, “Cybersecurity: Let’s Get Tactical,” in which the authors give ten ways cybercriminals are attacking with AI² including

• phishing attacks, in which, upon gaining credentialed access, automatic scripts can wreak havoc, including draining bank accounts
• credential stuffing and brute force attacks, in which AI systems try passwords — and password possibilities — on many websites
• bulletproof hosting services that use automation to hide the tracks of malicious websites, so they can’t be stopped by law-enforcement, or often flagged by network scanning tools

The fact is, it’s an arms race. Both malware and criminal sites would be pretty quickly and easily identified on a network by the nature of their activity. So the criminals try to disguise their malware in benign code and their sites in bulletproof hosting schemes. The way they keep the ruse going is through machine learning adapting to changing circumstances.

UPS Store headquarters issued a letter¹ to possible “victims of a phishing incident” that included Rhode Island UPS Store customers. Based on the letter, which hides the particulars, it looks like a criminal convinced an employee or employees in the UPS Store system to provide store email credentials. Once these credentials were had, customers emailing the store were also (or maybe only) sending their documents to the criminal. And possibly any data that had been kept in the email accounts were accessed.