Business Email Compromise (BEC) scammers, who have made rich returns in recent years tricking organisations into transferring funds into their accounts, have found a new tactic which attempts to swindle Wall Street firms out of significantly larger amounts of money. According to a newly published-report by Agari, scammers are seeking to defraud Wall Street businesses and their customers out of US $809,000 on average per incident. This emerging form of BEC attack is a “capital…

Account takeovers and online banking fraud are two types of attacks on the rise against financial institutions and their customers, says Feedzai. Image: William_Potter, Getty Images/iStockphoto Amid the coronavirus pandemic, 2020 saw a quick and abrupt transition to digital banking and commerce, a boon for banks and customers alike. But that shift also triggered a host of schemes and scams from cybercriminals eager to take advantage of the new environment. A financial crime report released…

A huge rise in financial crime was recorded last year, driven by the rapid shift to digital banking and commerce following COVID-19 lockdowns. This is according to Feedzai’s Financial Crime Report Q1 – 2021, which compared the volume of financial fraud and crime in Q4 and Q1 2020, with the latter quarter mainly unaffected by the pandemic. The study found there was a 650% surge in account takeover (ATO) in Q4 compared to Q1, with…

By Udi Levy, CEO & Co-Founder at Cobwebs Technologies With a growing number of malicious cyber activities, threat intelligence has become an integral part of many organizations. Most threat intelligence solutions available in the market still rely on analysts or investigators collecting, processing, and analyzing huge amounts of data for actionable insights. Collecting and processing these millions of data points and indicators is just too much for human analysts to effectively identify threats and process…

Vaccine-related phishing and Business Email Compromise (BEC) attempts jumped 26% in a recent three-month period, as scammers ramped up their efforts against organizations, according Barracuda Networks. The security vendor’s Threat Spotlight, analyzed phishing emails between October 2020 and January 2021. It revealed that, while the volume of vaccine-related spear-phishing attacks increased by 12% following announcements from Pfizer and Moderna in November 2020, this figure had more than doubled by the end of January 2021, after…

Ransomware surged by 150% in 2020 with the average extortion amount doubling, according to a new report from Group-IB. The Singapore-based security firm analyzed over 500 attacks last year to compile its Ransomware Uncovered 2020-2021 report, which maps for the first time the most common tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. The average ransom demand stood at $170,000 last year, but groups like Maze, DoppelPaymer, and RagnarLocker averaged between $1 million…