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.
LastPass is warning about an ongoing campaign where scammers are writing reviews for its Chrome extension to promote a fake customer support phone number. However, this phone number is part of a much larger campaign to trick callers into giving scammers remote access to their computers, as discovered by BleepingComputer. [...]
New phishing kit Xiu Gou, featuring a unique “doggo” mascot, targets users in US, UK, Spain, Australia and Japan with 2000+ scam websites
In the final weeks before November’s U.S. election, cybersecurity experts were calling October 2024 the “month of mischief”—a magnet for bad actors looking to disrupt the democratic process through AI-generated misinformation. This issue of AI Pulse looks at what can be done about deepfakes and other AI scams, and why defense-in-depth is the only way to go.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is warning of multiple schemes taking advantage of the upcoming U.S. general election to scam people out of their money or personal data. [...]
Academics Build AI Agent With OpenAI to Execute Phone Scams at ScaleHackers can use OpenAI's real-time voice API to carry out for less than a dollar deepfake scams involving voice impersonations of government officials or bank employees to swindle victims, said researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
The surge in job scams targets vulnerable individuals, mirroring pig butchering fraud tactics
Vipre research reveals that 10% of emails targeting the manufacturing sector are BEC attempts