According to WHDH 7News, the town of Tewksbury is trying to get more than $100,000 back after a threat actor posing as a vendor successfully tricked a town employee.
According to Town Manager Richard Montuori, what appeared to be a normal vendor e-mail asking about payment from authorized invoices was in fact a spoofed e-mail address.
Hackers have scooped the data of more than 515,000 people from the Red Cross, according to a press release by the organization mid-January. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, the information obtained includes confidential and personal identifying information of "highly vulnerable people, including those separated from their families due to conflict, migration and disaster, missing persons and their families, and people in detention.
The amount of total losses through fraud originating on social media is now 19 times higher than it was just five years ago in 2017, according to a Consumer Protection Data Spotlight published by the Federal Trade Commission on Jan 25.
According to the report, "More than 95,000 people reported about $770 million in losses to fraud" from threat actors using social engineering through social media in 2021.
The FTC explains that social media is a low-cost strategy.
The Baker-Polito administration filed their FY 2023 Budget proposal at the end of last month, which includes $164.1 million to be used by the Executive Office of Technology Services and Security for a multitude of cybersecurity and infrastructure updates.
The next step in critical infrastructure cybersecurity defense now begins as Joe Biden, like modern presidents before him, signed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2022 into law at the end of last month.
Sections 861-867 focus on Small Businesses, including committing the Department of Defense to analyze and review how their Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) can work for small businesses.
Almost a quarter of Americans (23%) have reported losing money to a phone scam in the past year, according to Truecaller Insights US Spam & Scam Report 2021. The actual percentage of people who have fallen for a scam, whether or not they've given money, is 31%.
Truecaller estimates that in total, Americans lost $29.8 billion, with an average of $502. Expanding, Truecaller says that 60% of these calls were robocalls instead of actual humans.
While you may not be a pirate yourself, chances are you know someone who gets their entertainment from less-than-legal means. If this is being done on your network, you might be at risk too. It's no surprise that the top pirated movie of 2021 was the latest Spider-Man film, which has even broken pre-2020 records at the box office.
On Monday, Nov. 22, popular domain registrar GoDaddy revealed in a public SEC filing that "an unauthorized third party" hacked into its systems back in early September and had access until mid-November.
According to GoDaddy, "Using a compromised password, an unauthorized third party accessed the provisioning system in our legacy code base for Managed WordPress.
The nonprofit SpamHaus, which tracks spam e-mails, noticed tens of thousands of urgent FBI bulletins going out the morning of November 13. These bulletins, warning of a "sophisticated chain attack," were sent by the FBI's servers. In actuality, a hacker had been able to get into the Bureau's e-mail notification system to distribute the false warnings.
The House unanimously passed H.R. 3462, the SBA Cyber Security Awareness Act, in early November, sending it to the Senate for approval.
"The SBA will be required to conduct an annual assessment of IT equipment and cybersecurity capabilities, and provide Congress a detailed account of any cyber security risk," said Rep.