Chatbot Scams On The Horizon

Chatbot scams are likely possibilities in the near future as language models (LMs) become more integrated into our daily lives, the National Cyber Security Centre has claimed. Due to previous security concerns regarding data protection, LMs have already been banned by many companies and educational institutions, doing little to impact popularity, as they have undeniably useful qualities.

Growing numbers of companies are using them to deal with user queries, and people are becoming more accustomed to entrusting chatbots with personal information.

Large Increase in BEC Scams in 2020, as the Business World Shifts Online

Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams, also known as ‘CEO Fraud’, stole billions of dollars from businesses in 2020 alone.
These days, most people are aware that cybercrime is a very real and ever-increasing threat. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, many workers were forced to work remotely for the first time, from their bedrooms, living rooms and kitchen. Terms like ‘phishing’ and ‘ransomware’ are now frequently seen and heard, but there is another type of threat that has seen a huge increase in frequency in 2020 – Business Email Compromise.

New ‘Copyright’ Phishing Scam Uses Website Contact Forms

Earlier this month, Microsoft threat analysts released an alert in a blog post warning organisations of a new attack vector being used to deploy malware.

Thousands of Organisations Compromised by ‘Hafnium’ Email Hack

As the saying goes, there’s no rest for the wicked. Just a few months after behemoth IT management solutions provider SolarWinds was the victim of a major cyber attack, IT professionals across the globe are scrambling to patch their Exchange servers against a new zero-day exploit. Earlier this month, it was announced that hundreds of thousands of organisations (at least 30,000 in the US alone) had potentially been compromised by a group called Hafnium, who are based out of China and believed to be state-sponsored.

Many SolarWinds Customers Still Exposed Online, Despite Well-Publicised Breach

IT management software giant Solarwinds were the victims of what is believed to be one of the largest cyber attacks yet late last year, sending shivers down the spine of much of the tech world. The attack breached SolarWinds monitoring tool Orion, which allowed the hackers to deliver malicious updates to unsuspecting users of the tool for several months. Now, two months after the breach was discovered, an alarming number of SolarWinds customers still have vulnerable Orion servers exposed to the internet.