Scams use deception to steal money, credentials, or sensitive data, making them a cybersecurity risk for individuals and organizations.
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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.
Weekly headline count for the current query.
It’s possible to leak PII describing 5.7 million people without breaching privacy rules
Latest Interpol review shows how scams continue to dominate, and AI-enabled attackers prove too hot to handle for cash-strapped regions
Telegram-based 'Outsider Enterprise' accused of sending millions of scam texts and impersonating trusted brands
Victims losing £280K a day to fake profiles and sob stories
Victims losing £280K a day to fake profiles and sob stories Romance fraudsters scammed Britons out of £102 million ($138 million) last year, according to the latest police figures.…
Legit-looking website, camera-on interviews, jokes about backdoors ... it worked EXCLUSIVE It all started with a LinkedIn message, as so many employment scams do these days.…
Fortune 500 companies and one US defense contractor got taken for $5m in four-year scam Two Americans have been jailed for a combined 200 months for helping North Korea generate $5 million through fraudulent IT worker schemes.…
Cops bust latest scam, return $12m to bilked victims US, UK, and Canadian law enforcement Thursday said that they disrupted a $45 million global cryptocurrency scam, freezing $12 million in stolen funds and identifying more than 20,000 cryptocurrency wallet addresses linked to fraud victims across 30 countries.…
Bots are now firmly in the toolbox, helping crooks scale old scams Crims are taking advantage of AI to sharpen old scams. The FBI reported Monday that cybercrime losses hit a record $20.87 billion in 2025, with help from bots.…
Researchers map full org chart of the scam from dodgy recruiters to helpful Western collaborators Researchers at IBM X‑Force and Flare Research have uncovered data that sheds light on how North Korea's fake IT worker schemes operate and infiltrate companies in order to funnel money back to the regime and steal sensitive information.…
150k accounts nuked, 21 suspects arrested Not every scam starts with malware or a compromised account. Sometimes all it takes is a friend request or a link shared via chat.…
Advocate General urges rethink of PSD2 to speed compensation after scams Analysis One of the European Union's top legal advisors is trying to change how banks treat cybercrime victims – meaning they could enjoy greater financial protections sooner than expected.…
Crooks used simple phone scam to compromise vendor account, spilling personal and financial data belonging to more than 15,000 people A voice-phishing scam targeting one of Ericsson's service providers has exposed the personal data of more than 15,000 individuals after attackers sweet-talked an employee into handing over access.…
Crooks tweak familiar copy-paste ruse so that victims run malicious commands themselves A new twist on the long-running ClickFix scam is now tricking Windows users into launching Windows Terminal and pasting malware into it themselves – handing the credential-stealing Lumma infostealer the keys to their browser vault.…
Crims hope for payday from malicious payloads rather than stealing access tokens Microsoft has warned organizations about ongoing OAuth abuse scams that use phishing emails and URL redirects to infect victims' machines with malware and take over their devices.…
Vulnerable citizens targeted by criminals purporting to represent fake police crisis department Scammers targeted Dubai citizens mere hours after missiles struck the city, attempting to gain access to their bank accounts, police have warned.…
PLUS: Unpatched Ivanti boxes under attack; 0APT might not be a scam; AI gets better at helping cyber-scum; And more Infosec In Brief An unknown attacker accessed the French government’s database listing every bank account in the country and made off with 1.2 million records.…
Teach a crook to phish… Criminals can more easily pull off social engineering scams and other forms of identity fraud thanks to custom voice-phishing kits being sold on dark web forums and messaging platforms.…
Phishing campaign tries to reel in master passwords Password managers make great targets for attackers because they can hold many of the keys to your kingdom. Now, LastPass has warned customers about phishing emails claiming that action is required ahead of scheduled maintenance and told them not to fall for the scam. …
PLUS: Cambodia arrests alleged scam camp boss; Baidu spins out chip biz; Panasonic’s noodle shop plan; And more! Asia in Brief The governments of Malaysia and Indonesia have suspended access to social network X, on grounds that it allows users to produce sexual imagery without users’ consent.…