A few years ago, scammers invented a new phishing email. They would claim to have hacked your computer, turned your webcam on, and videoed you watching porn or having sex. BuzzFeed has an article talking about a “shockingly realistic” variant, which includes photos of you and your house—more specific information. The article contains “steps you … Read More “The “Incriminating Video” Scam” »
Category: phishing
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There’s a new cybersecurity awareness campaign: Take9. The idea is that people—you, me, everyone—should just pause for nine seconds and think more about the link they are planning to click on, the file they are planning to download, or whatever it is they are planning to share. There’s a website—of course—and a video, well-produced and … Read More “Why Take9 Won’t Improve Cybersecurity” »
In case you need proof that anyone, even people who do cybersecurity for a living, Troy Hunt has a long, iterative story on his webpage about how he got phished. Worth reading. Powered by WPeMatico
This isn’t new, but it’s increasingly popular: The technique is known as device code phishing. It exploits “device code flow,” a form of authentication formalized in the industry-wide OAuth standard. Authentication through device code flow is designed for logging printers, smart TVs, and similar devices into accounts. These devices typically don’t support browsers, making it … Read More “Device Code Phishing” »
A piece I coauthored with Fredrik Heiding and Arun Vishwanath in the Harvard Business Review: Summary. Gen AI tools are rapidly making these emails more advanced, harder to spot, and significantly more dangerous. Recent research showed that 60% of participants fell victim to artificial intelligence (AI)-automated phishing, which is comparable to the success rates of … Read More “AI Will Increase the Quantity—and Quality—of Phishing Scams” »
Brian Krebs reported that X (formerly known as Twitter) started automatically changing twitter.com links to x.com links. The problem is: (1) it changed any domain name that ended with “twitter.com,” and (2) it only changed the link’s appearance (anchortext), not the underlying URL. So if you were a clever phisher and registered fedetwitter.com, people would … Read More “X.com Automatically Changing Link Text but Not URLs” »
I get UPS phishing spam on my phone all the time. I never click on it, because it’s so obviously spam. Turns out that hackers have been harvesting actual UPS delivery data from a Canadian tracking tool for its phishing SMSs. Powered by WPeMatico
Researchers are worried about Google’s .zip and .mov domains, because they are confusing. Mistaking a URL for a filename could be a security vulnerability. Powered by WPeMatico
Here’s an experiment being run by undergraduate computer science students everywhere: Ask ChatGPT to generate phishing emails, and test whether these are better at persuading victims to respond or click on the link than the usual spam. It’s an interesting experiment, and the results are likely to vary wildly based on the details of the … Read More “LLMs and Phishing” »
This is a good list of modern phishing techniques. Powered by WPeMatico