What is a lateral phishing attack? A lateral phishing attack occurs when “one or more compromised employee accounts in an organization are used to target other employees in the same organization. Lateral phishing is similar to business email compromise (BEC), but while the latter is usually about getting victims to carry out fraudulent wire transfers, the main goal of the former is usually credential theft.” I suppose it means the attack occurs laterally across the org chart.
Been called to jury duty lately? Even if you haven’t, you might still get phished. Last week, in Ventura County, CA, a phishing scam was going around telling people that they missed their jury duty appointment.
According to the Citizens Journal, “In the calls and emails, recipients are pressured to provide confidential information, potentially leading to identity theft and fraud. These calls and emails, which threaten recipients with fines and jail time if they do not comply are fraudulent and are not connected with the Camarillo Police Department or the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office.”
Email forwarding is so common place, most people don’t give it another thought. But, as I pointed out in a recent post, email forwarding isn’t always smart to do.
In that post, I point out a handful of reasons why blindly forwarding emails can get you into a little hot water. First, there are the copyright issues. When someone writes an email, it is by definition, copyrighted. Depending on who you are forwarding it to, where and how often, you could be in violation of copyright law.
If you follow the news at all, you know that phishing attacks, cyber breaches and ransomware are everywhere. It’s practically an epidemic. But, not all victims are created equal.
It’s one thing if a bank or a big corporation or even a government entity gets hit with a cyber-attack. They either have, or can find the resources to recover from such an event. Many even have some form of insurance to bail them out. But lately, hackers have pulled out all the stops and have started targeting some of the most vulnerable in society.
If it’s making headlines, you can be sure it’ll be used in a phishing scam. What’s the big news this week? Jeffrey Epstein suicide in jail. Queue the phishing emails.
According to KnowBe4, “a series of scams are underway using the Epstein death as social engineering tactic.” Maybe something to the effect of “See Jeffrey Epstein Last Words on Video.” Admittedly it’s hard not to click on that, but don’t.
Phishing is so widespread today, you can feel the effects of a phishing attack even if you’re not the one who got phished. The latest example of this is detailed in a report on Bleeping Computer: “Phishing Attacks Target US Utilities with Remote Access Trojan.”
About a year ago, information security company Shred-it released a report saying “Employee negligence is the main cause of data breaches.” I have no doubt that’s true. The part I disagree with is the solution.
The solution that’s being promoted for the “employee” problem is phishing awareness training. And not just training, but MORE training. There’s only one problem with this way of thinking: it won’t eliminate data breaches.
We’re always impressed when fraudsters come up with new and clever ways to execute phishing scams and this week didn’t disappoint us. This week we get word of a phishing scam disguised as fake e-tickets for Korean Airlines.
According to the article, “South Korean flag carrier Korean Air (KE) has warned customers against phishing scams using fake e-tickets. Seungwon Chung, KE Global Communications deputy general manager, confirmed with the Philippine News Agency (PNA) on Monday that the carrier has received [a] few complaints regarding this recently.”
DuoCircle, an email security company, has just completed itsfirst scholarship program offering a $1000 award for the best essay or video on email privacy and security.
Specific topics covered included the following:
How can the underlying causes of phishing be addressed?
What will change in email security in the next 10 years?
How would you teach older folks or children to avoid phishing and protect their privacy?
Phishing attacks can cause a lot of damage, so we try to not make light of them. But every now and then you have to look on the bright side.
There was news last week that “Several thousand school children in Alabama had their summer vacation extended by two weeks as the Houston County School District was forced for the second time to delay opening day due to a cyberattack.”
At DuoCircle we like to stay up to date on the latest phishing tactics so we can share them with you to keep you prepared. And we never cease to be amazed at the cleverness of hackers.
One of the fastest-growing email threats is account takeover, where a hacker takes over someone’s email account. Once they do, they have a lot of options, and one of the options they’re starting to choose is something called lateral phishing.
It wouldn’t be a week if there was some scam aimed at Apple customers. Now comes word of a phony Apple phishing email. “Although the email address from which it was sent appears to be legitimate, upon closer examination you can determine it is not an official email address of Apple. As phishing emails go, this one is pretty good.”
At DuoCircle, we offer email forwarding. We understand that at this point email forwarding is more or less a commodity. Oh sure, you want your email forwarding to come with advanced features like forwarding groups, spam/virus protection and seamless integration into your email service. But, just because email forwarding is easy to do, doesn’t mean it’s always smart to do.
What if there existed a technology that could dramatically lower the chances of your domains being spoofed and used for phishing attacks on recipients. Would you take advantage of it? Probably not, because the technology does exist and almost nobody is using it. And the reasons why are confounding.
Most phishing emails contain a malicious link in the hope that the recipient will click on it.Phishing prevention technology is wise to this tactic, which has forced attackers to adapt. Their latest adaptation is a novel new phishing technique targetingAmerican Express customers, by breaking the malicious link up into two parts.
Email backup is not the same as email archiving. They’re different, and solve very different problems.
Email backup stores your emails when your email server goes down by providing you a backup email server. In this manner, email backup is a very important part of business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR). That’s the problem it solves. If something goes wrong with your email server, you won’t lose any emails.
We anticipate that the DNS migration to Cloudflare on July 20th, 2019 will be uneventful, however in the event that there is an issue we have incorporated DNS redundancies into your
email services.
This is not a good time to be a city in Florida if you’re looking to avoid a ransomware attack. First it was Riviera Beach on June 5. Then it was Lake City on June 10. Now it’s Key Biscayne. According to the Miami Herald, “The village of Key Biscayne confirmed Thursday it had been hit by a cyberattack — the third Florida city this month to fall victim to outside hackers.”
Employees travel, that’s part of being in business. And when they travel, they’re going to check their email. There’s no reason that simple act should put your organization at risk, but for many companies, it does. That’s because of the safeguards they put in place, don’t always travel with the employees. But they should.
If you’re a professional archivist, one of the things you should archive is email. If you’re a Registered Investment Advisor, one of the things you MUST archive is email.
