Trusted research on email, mobile, web, and DNS security.
A group of criminals is currently threatening to delete hundreds of millions of Apple iCloud accounts and lock users out of their devices unless Apple pays $70,000 ransom. Let’s take a look at how serious this threat really is (not very), and what both individual users and enterprises can do to prevent this sort of […]
Phishing, and particularly spear phishing, may be low tech, but it remains one of the most potent tools in the cyber criminal’s toolbox. In the past it has usually been used for financial crimes, along with some industrial and national espionage, but there is an alarming increase in attacks aimed at more general intelligence gathering. […]
One of the significant issues in the current US Presidential election campaign has been the use and abuse of email. Both Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server for government business while she was Secretary of State, and the allegation that the Russian government has been hacking Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign emails […]
Earlier this morning the Milwaukee Bucks announced that their organization had become the recent victim of a W-2 spear phishing attack. Crooks managed to extort the Buck’s 2015 tax records for every employee, including players. Similar to a number of incidents we’ve detailed in the past, attackers impersonated the organization’s CEO (or in this case […]
Cloudmark’s Security Threat Report for Q1 of 2016 is now live. This quarter we cover: Characteristics of and methods used in script-based Locky ransomware attacks The Locky family’s explosion onto ransomware scene in Q1 due to aggressive distribution A look at the regions most impacted by Locky Analysis of Locky attacks sent to Japan, the […]
Last month, hackers gained access to the control systems of a power grid in Ukraine using spear phishing, leaving over 100 cities without electricity. The attack started with a highly tailored spear phishing email to the employees of Ukrainian power companies, with a malicious XLS or Word document, which the employees opened on a system with […]
To users, spear phishing emails may seem like innocent requests for information or other forms of benign contact, potentially appearing to even come from a person or company a user is friendly or familiar with. But for attackers, spear phishing emails are most often the best way to get the keys to the kingdom. Most […]
In 13 years of protecting hundreds of millions of end users from email and mobile spam, Cloudmark has seen billions of malicious emails, giving the company an inside view of the threats that come from messaging environments. We’ve seen the rise of phishing emails and their effects. And more recently, in the past several years, […]
The stream of massive data breaches continued in 2015. It seems that no sector was immune to hacking: banks, government, dating sites, healthcare, ISPs, and even security companies were compromised. Anywhere there was sensitive data hackers were trying to obtain it, and in many cases they succeeded. However, hacking is not entirely without risks, and […]
Sometimes I feel I am very old. I was born in the same year as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and have watched the microprocessor revolution from the beginning. What a long strange trip it’s been. My first experience of writing programs was painfully inscribing FORTRAN with a ball point pen on paper. This was […]