Cybersecurity

A new large-scale phishing campaign is employing a custom proxy-based phishing kit to bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA) and a variety of URL obfuscation techniques to circumvent email security software to steal credentials for Microsoft email accounts, according to security researchers at Zscaler. Notably, the campaign has targeted energy companies in the U.S., the U.K., New Zealand, and Australia. Researchers believe the goal of the campaign is to compromise corporate email accounts to carry out BEC (business email compromise) attacks.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) published a cybersecurity action plan and resource guide for small organizations that may not have the maturity or financial resources of larger firms. In the guide, CISA lays out an action plan informed by the way cyber attacks actually happen. According to CISA, “we break the tasks down by role, starting with the CEO. We then detail tasks for a Security Program Manager, and the Information Technology (IT) team.

When it comes to phishing and other scams, as a society, we’ve largely grasped the age-old “don’t click on things you don’t recognize” advice. However, threat actors turned that age-old advice against us years ago when they began leveraging well-known brands to trick us into clicking on their malicious links and attachments. The success of social engineering based cyber attacks relies on trust and it’s the trust those brands have already engendered that give scams the air of credibility.

Today, VMWare released a security advisory warning system administrators to patch a critical authentication bypass security vulnerability that affects local domain users in multiple products and allows unauthenticated attackers to gain admin privileges.