Scams use deception to steal money, credentials, or sensitive data, making them a cybersecurity risk for individuals and organizations.
Search across headline titles and summaries.
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.
A new variant of the ongoing sextortion email scams is now targeting spouses, saying that their husband or wife is cheating on them, with links to the alleged proof. [...]
A new variant of the ongoing sextortion email scams is now targeting spouses, saying that their husband or wife is cheating on them, with links to the alleged proof. [...]
Threat actors affiliated with North Korea have been observed leveraging LinkedIn as a way to target developers as part of a fake job recruiting operation
Also: Hacker Launders Stolen WazirX Funds; Galois, Uniswap SettlementsThis week, pig-butchering scams and bitcoin ATM scams increased, an update in the FTX case, stolen WazirX funds were laundered, settlements in the SEC-Galois and CFTC-Uniswap cases, Scotland seized crypto in a robbery, North Korea targeted Web3 staff, and the Mt. Gox CEO launched a new crypto firm.
Banks Using AI to Spot Fraud, Create Synthetic Data for Better Predictive AnalyticsWhile the criminals may have an advantage in the AI race, banks and other financial services firms are responding with heightened awareness and vigilance, and a growing number of organizations are exploring AI tools to improve fraud detection and response to AI-driven scams.
UK’s Financial Ombudsman warns fraud and scams hit a record high in Q2 2024
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has reported a massive increase in losses to Bitcoin ATM scams, nearly ten times the amount from 2020 and reaching over $110 million in 2023. [...]
An old but persistent email scam known as "sextortion" has a new personalized touch: The missives, which claim that malware has captured webcam footage of recipients pleasuring themselves, now include a photo of the target's home in a bid to make threats about publishing the videos more frightening and convincing.