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.
Thieves go nose-to-tail stripping cash from victims The US Department of Justice has seized cryptocurrency worth about $112 million from accounts linked to so-called pig butchering investment scams.…
Authorities claw back funds from six crypto accounts they say were linked to a "pig-butchering" cybercrime ring.
Tactical#Octopus: Don't let users click on that zip file The last few days of America's tax season are stressful enough, dealing with deadlines and, increasingly, online scams. Now comes another one, a sophisticated and ongoing phishing campaign by a threat group dubbed "Tactical#Octopus" that is using tax-related lures to spread malware.…
John Clifton Davies, a 60-year-old con man from the United Kingdom who fled the country in 2015 before being sentenced to 12 years in prison for fraud, has enjoyed a successful life abroad swindling technology startups by pretending to be a billionaire investor. Davies' newest invention appears to be "CodesToYou," which purports to be a "full cycle software development company" based in the U.K.
To scupper scams, account-holders must hand over personal info or else Almost two million mobile phone subscribers in Vietnam are at risk of having their services severed, thanks to a new government policy that seeks to curb spam.…