Willie Sutton, the criminal who became legendary for stealing from banks during a forty year career , was once asked, "Why do you keep robbing banks?" His answer? "Because that's where the money is." However, today there's a better target for robbers today than banks, which are typically well-defended against theft... Cryptocurrency wallets. Trezor, the manufacturers of one of the world's leading...

OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot has been a phenomenon, taking the internet by storm. Whether it is composing poetry, writing essays for college students, or finding bugs in computer code, it has impressed millions of people and proven itself to be the most accessible form of artificial intelligence ever seen. Yes, there are plenty of fears about how the technology could be used and abused, questions to...

A ransomware outfit is advising its victims to secretly tell them how much insurance they have, so their extortion demands will be met. As security researchers at Varonis describe , a new strain of the HardBit ransomware has taken the unusual step of asking targeted companies to spill the beans of whether they have cyber insurance (and the terms of that insurance) anonymously. According to a part...

The owner of a Russian penetration-testing company has been found guilty of being part of an elaborate scheme that netted $90 million after stealing SEC earning reports. For nearly three years, 42-year-old Vladislav Klyushin - the owner of Moscow-based cybersecurity firm M-13 - and his co-conspirators had hacked into two US-based filing agents used by publicly-traded American companies to file...

UK banking group TSB is calling on social networks and dating apps to better protect their users from fake profiles, following an alarming spike in romance fraud . Examining data from December 2020 - January 2022, TSB determined that romance fraud almost doubled compared to pre-pandemic levels, with a record increase in losses of 91% - averaging £6,100 per incident. The bank's findings uncovered...

A 22-year-old suspected of being "Seyzo", a member of the ShinyHunters cybercrime gang, has been extradited from Morocco to the United States, where - if convicted - he could face up to 116 years in prison. Sebastien Raoult, a French national, was arrested at Rabat international airport in Morocco on May 31 2022, while trying to take a flight to Brussels. Law enforcement in Morocco detained former...

I keep hearing about LockBit ransomware attacks. What's going on? It's no surprise if you have heard about LockBit. It is the world's most active ransomware group - responsible for an estimated 40% of all ransomware infections worldwide. I guess LockBit does the usual bad stuff - encrypt your data, steal your files, dump a ransom note on your PC... Yes. The first you might know that you've been...

It's time for you and your colleagues to become more skeptical about what you read. That's a takeaway from a series of experiments undertaken using GPT-3 AI text-generating interfaces to create malicious messages designed to spear-phish, scam, harrass, and spread fake news. Experts at WithSecure have described their investigations into just how easy it is to automate the creation of credible yet...

Do ransomware gangs actually have a heart? Perhaps... Just days before Christmas, on the night of Sunday 18 December 2022, Canada's Hospital for Sick Children (better known as SickKids) was hit by a ransomware attack . The Toronto-based teaching and research hospital reported that the attack had impacted its internal systems, phone lines, and website. The hospital predicted that it would take...

The FBI is warning US consumers that cybercriminals are placing ads in search engine results that impersonate well-known brands, in an attempt to spread ransomware and steal financial information. In a public service announcement issued this week, the FBI describes how cybercriminals are purchasing ads that show up at the very top of search engine results, often purporting to link to a legitimate...

Law enforcement agencies in the United States, UK, Netherlands, Poland, and Germany have brought down the most popular DDoS-for-hire services on the internet, responsible for tens of millions of attacks against websites. 50 of the world's biggest "booter" sites used to launch disruptive distributed denial-of-service attacks have been taken down as part of "Operation Power Off" - a joint action by...

Malicious hackers, hell-bent on infiltrating an organisation, have no qualms about exploiting even the most tragic events. Take, for instance, the horrific crowd crush that occurred in Seoul's nightlife district of Itaweon on 29 October, when over 150 people were killed during Halloween festivities. Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) reports this week that it saw a North Korean government-backed...

Researchers investigating a newly-discovered botnet have admitted that they "accidentally" broke it. In November, security experts at Akamai described a Golang-based botnet that they had discovered, hijacking PCs via SSH and weak credentials in order to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and mine cryptocurrency. The botnet, which the researchers called KmsdBot attacked both...

UK police are texting 70,000 people who they believe have fallen victim to a worldwide scam that saw fraudsters steal at least £50 million from bank accounts. 200,000 people in the UK, including the elderly and disabled, are thought to have been targeted by conmen who masqueraded as highstreet banks. Scammers paid a subscription to a service called iSpoof.cc that allowed them to disguise their...

Healthcare organisations in the United States are being warned to be on their guard once again, this time against a family of ransomware known as Venus. An advisory from the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has warned that the cybercriminals behind the Venus ransomware have targeted at least one healthcare entity in the United States, and are known to be targeting...

PC manufacturer Lenovo has been forced to push out a security update to more than two dozen of its laptop models, following the discovery of high severity vulnerabilities that could be exploited by malicious hackers. Security researchers at ESET discovered flaws in 25 of its laptop models - including IdeaPads, Slims, and ThinkBooks - that could be used to disable the UEFI Secure Boot process. That...

As everyone has surely heard by now, Elon Musk has bought Twitter . The controversial tech maverick's takeover of the site has caused some consternation for the site's users , employees , and advertisers - and has also proven a golden opportunity for scammers . Numerous verified Twitter users have reported receiving phishing emails from fraudsters, purporting to be a legitimate message from the...

LinkedIn says it is beefing up its security in an attempt to better protect its user base from fraudulent activity.

October is “Cybersecurity Awareness Month,” a time when cybersecurity specialists everywhere push hard to get the message out that cybersecurity is important.

You always want to know what is attached to your network. And whether it could be vulnerable or not. In any organisation it's normal for different devices, on- or off-prem, wired or wireless, to be constantly added or removed - and this can present an opportunity for malicious hackers to take advantage of improperly secured systems. In many cases, organizations have no idea about how many assets...