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.
Account manager and pals blew it on hotels, cruise, fancy meals and more allegedly Five people have been accused of pulling off a "brazen" scam that involved submitting more than $7 million in fake work expense claims to an IT consultancy to bankroll hotel stays, a cruise, visits to strip clubs, and more.…
Legal Moves: Crypto Theft Lawsuit; Hospital Sues LockBit GangIn the latest weekly update, ISMG editors discussed why crypto-seeking drainer scam-as-a-service operations are thriving, a novel legal move that recovered a hospital's stolen data, and a ground-breaking case involving bitcoin that could streamline recovery for victims.
A Canadian man who says he's been falsely charged with orchestrating a complex e-commerce scam is seeking to clear his name. His case appears to involve "triangulation fraud," which occurs when a consumer purchases something online -- from a seller on Amazon or eBay, for example -- but the seller doesn't actually own the item for sale. Instead, the seller purchases the item from an online retailer using stolen payment card data. In this scam, the unwitting buyer pays the scammer and receives what they ordered, and very often the only party left to dispute the transaction is the owner of the stolen payment card.
American Hospital Association Warns of Social Engineering SchemesThe American Hospital Association is warning of increasingly sophisticated social engineering scams targeting hospital IT help desks with schemes involving the stolen credentials of revenue cycle and other finance employees to commit payment fraud against the institutions.
Dubai Police and Ghana's Cyber Security Authority issue public warnings, but they're battling human nature and users' inattention.
.SBS gTLD once owned by Australian broadcaster is another source of strife Scammers are buying up cheap domain names to host sites that sell dodgy health products using fake articles, according to cybercrime disruption outfit Netcraft.…
$295 Million in Digital Assets Lost Last Year to Wallet Drainers, Researchers WarnCryptocurrency phishing scams designed to send crypto owners to fake versions of legitimate sites, recently disseminated via hijacked high-profile social media accounts, highlight the ongoing use of drainer scam-as-a-service offerings, which researchers say last year led to $295 million in losses.
‘Inaccessible and autonomous armed group territories’ host crooks who use tech to launder cash, run slave scam gangs, and more Global crime networks have set up shop in autonomous territories run by armed gangs across Southeast Asia, and are using them to host physical and online casinos that, in concert with crypto exchanges, have led to an explosion of money laundering, cyberfraud, and cybercrime across the region and beyond.…