In November 2023, researchers discovered a new loader, dubbed Latrodectus, due to a string identified in the malware’s code. As of February, Latrodectus has been identified and delivered in nearly a dozen phishing campaigns, downloading payloads undetected.
The NJCCIC observed an uptick in reported SocGholish infections targeting public sector websites. The MS-ISAC also reported that SocGholish was the most observed malware in Q4 of 2023, comprising 60 percent of the top 10 malware incidents.
According to the FBI IC3 Internet Crime Report 2023, business email compromise (BEC) scams are the second most expensive type of cybercrime. Over the past three years, the number of US victims increased from 19,954 (2021) to 21,832 (2022) but decreased slightly to 21,489.
The threat actors behind BazaCall (also known as BazarCall), have been observed using multiple tactics to breach targeted networks and lure unsuspecting victims into downloading its malicious malware. Read this to learn more on how to protect against this threat.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) stated that over $1.1 billion in losses from impersonation scams were reported in 2023. The report shows that 330,000 incidents were business impersonation scams, and nearly 160,000 were government impersonation scams.
The NJCCIC is receiving reports of ransomware incidents impacting private organizations and the public sector. Threat actors primarily targeted critical infrastructure and educational institutions, likely due to budgetary restraints, limited resources, among other reasons.
An XZ Utils vulnerability allowed the embedding of malicious code in the libraries for XZ Utils versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1. XZ Utils is data compression software that is present in several Linux distributions. The resulting build interferes with authentication in sshd via systemd.
As more users adopt multi-factor authentication (MFA) for account security, threat actors increase efforts to bypass this security measure. They often use phishing emails to gather login details for online accounts and phishing kits to increase the effectiveness of these campaigns.
Search Generative Experience (SGE) is Google’s upcoming generative artificial intelligence (AI) search feature. Google first allowed users to opt into the Google SGE results in May 2023. Google began rolling out this feature to a small sample of random users who have not yet opted in.
Threat actors use SMS texts in phishing campaigns to steal users’ personal data, funds, etc. SMS-based phishing (SMiShing) may be more effective than email phishing as these messages are viewed on a mobile device, making it difficult to identify malicious texts.
