Scams use deception to steal money, credentials, or sensitive data, making them a cybersecurity risk for individuals and organizations.
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Background for this topic.
Scams are deceptive schemes intended to make people surrender money, credentials, sensitive information, or access. In information security, they commonly use phishing messages, impersonation, fraudulent websites, business-email compromise, fake technical support, or malicious attachments. Their defining feature is manipulation: the attacker creates a credible pretext and pressures the target to act before verifying the request.
Security teams should treat scams as an attack surface spanning email, messaging, telephone calls, social media, and payment workflows. Material risks include account takeover through stolen credentials, unauthorized payments, disclosure of personal or company data, and malware execution from deceptive content. Useful controls include phishing-resistant authentication, secure payment-change procedures with independent verification, filtering and domain protections, user training focused on reporting, and rapid review of suspicious messages or transactions. Incident handling may require revoking sessions, resetting credentials, contacting financial institutions, preserving evidence, and notifying affected parties where applicable.
An active extortion scam is targeting website owners and admins worldwide, claiming to have hacked their servers and demanding $2,500 not to leak data. [...]
The FBI and U.S. Postal Inspection Service have seized eighteen web domains used to recruit money mules for work-from-home and reshipping scams. [...]
An Instagram influencer known as 'Hushpuppi' has been sentenced to 11 years in prison for conspiring to launder tens of millions of USD from business email compromise (BEC) scams and various cyber schemes. [...]