Trusted research on email, mobile, web, and DNS security.
Sex scams are a common form of online fraud. In email, they often take the form of relationship fraud, where a confidence trickster may assume a fake persona and spend months or years building up an online relationship with a victim before asking for a large sum of money for plane tickets or a family […]
SMS Bank and account phishing in the U.S. more than tripled in September and continues as the nation’s number one category of reported SMS. However, some very notable cities such as New York City have dodged these malicious attempts at users’ financial and account details. Over the past two months, we’ve seen a sharp increase […]
Up noticeably this month, a new form of broader bank phishing attacks seems to be targeting various parts of the U.S. including Las Vegas where 63 percent of all reported SMS spam turns out to be bank phishing. The trend continued during the finals days of August as an average 46 percent of all reported […]
The vendor area at Black Hat goes by the name of The Business Hall, and that sums it up. It is full of security companies, large and small, pitching their products in typical trade show fashion. The vendor area at Defcon is not like that. It is a jumble of vendors selling hacker equipment, lock […]
Mobile broadband modems are small USB sticks that connect a computer to the internet through a cellular network. The great convenience of being able to stay connected outside of areas with Wi-Fi has led to over 100 million of these devices being sold. However, security flaws in these ubiquitous modems may become a boon for cybercriminals. […]
Just last night, I upgraded my Mac Air to the latest release of OSX. The upgrade did not go as smoothly as most. When rebooting, my computer hung for a couple of hours with the screen saying Restarting . When I finally got bored with this and held down the power key for a hard […]
Spammers and attackers in both email and SMS were quick to redouble their efforts this quarter. In our 2014 Q2 Global Messaging Threat Report, we take a look at some of these various new trends popping up around the world. Comically, email phishers were quick to exploit the Heartbleed exploit without using the exploit. Deploying […]
We’ve seen an interesting shift in Chicago’s SMS spam over the past few months. At the start of 2014, up until mid-April, bank phishing attempts had been the dominate flavor of SMS sent unsolicited to phones in the city. However, Floridian Cruise spam has taken a big jump in numbers this spring. So far this […]
Cloudmark has observed that in some cases different categories of SMS spammers target different types of US Regional Mobile Operators, also known as tier 2 or tier 3 operators. Mobile operators are divided into different tiers depending on whether they fully own the network that they use to deliver voice and data services (tier 1), […]
With the New Year, it appears SMS scammers in the U.S. have taken a renewed interest in bank and account phishing mobile users. In January alone, more than half of all SMS spam reported via the GSMA Spam Reporting Service within the US were phishing attempts. From targeting prepaid debit cards for Child Support Recipients […]
