The Manor Independent School District is out $2.3 million after falling to an apparent phishing scam. Officials for the Texas school district claim that three separate fraudulent transactions took place in November 2019 following the phishing attack. The scammers carried out the attacks using a variety of tactics, including disguised email addresses, phone numbers, fake links, and more. The school district took to Facebook on January 10 to post that the incident was caused by a phishing email.

Phishing scams remain one of the most widespread cybercrimes. A phishing scam can be as simple as getting someone to click on a link, attachment, or a picture of cute kittens. I recently received a spam email with the message: “Old friends post embarrassing pictures of Jason Nelson online; click here to see.” Seeing my name in the body or subject line of an email is alarming. That is why scammers word these emails this way.

New findings from FICO claim that UK card fraud accounts for over half of all losses across Europe. The firm's new European Fraud Map reveals that UK card fraud losses hit over £671 in 2018, representing a 19% increase from the losses accumulated in 2017. UK card fraud losses amount to almost half of the £1.6 billion in total losses recorded across the 19 countries in the European interactive map, including Ukraine, Russia, and Turkey.

You can’t go a week without seeing a story about a data breach or ransomware hitting organizations. These breaches can be very costly, but they still continue to show up. Are the good guys not winning the cybersecurity war? Organizations invest millions of dollars in security products and services, but they keep getting breached.

Diligent taxpayers are being increasingly targeted by con artists who are well-versed in manipulating the revenue system. The crooks usually impersonate IRS (U.S. Internal Revenue Service) officials, sending fake emails or messages on social media in an attempt to defraud the targeted individuals of their money. Unfortunately, lots of people fall for these scams, and the malefactors are raking in significant profits. Below is a list of the prevalent tax swindles doing the rounds nowadays.

Email spoofing is the creation of emails with a forged sender address. Because core email protocols lack authentication, phishing attacks and spam emails can spoof the email header to mislead the recipient about the sender of the email. The goal of email spoofing is to get recipients to open, respond and engage with the email message. Email spoofing can greatly increase the effectiveness of phishing and other email-based cyber attacks by tricking the recipient into trusting the email and its sender.

The fact that scammers haunt Facebook and Twitter is not surprising. Even so, digital criminals don’t stop with just those two platforms. They’re also known to stalk users on LinkedIn where connections carry greater professional gravity. Fortunately, users can stay alert of such activity by familiarizing themselves with the most common types of LinkedIn scams. Here are five ruses, in particular, that should be on their radar.

Toyota Boshoku, a seating and interiors supplier for Toyota cars, has revealed that it was tricked into moving a large amount of money into a bank account controlled by scammers. In a statement published on its global website, Toyota Boshoku Corporation said that its European subsidiary was duped into transferring approximately four billion yen (over US $37 million) out of the business and into a bank account controlled by criminals on 14 August.

The number of fraudulent email circulations seems to grow with each passing day. Scammers use email fraud with the main motive of deceiving users for their gain. This is especially true in the financial institutions where attackers use domain spoofing schemes to send emails to employees or customers.

Researchers at Sixgill recently discovered more than 23 million stolen debit and credit cards for sale on the dark web. The majority of stolen cards found on the site were issued in the US, more than 15 million, making up almost two out of every three cards. The UK was the second biggest hit. The researchers noted that only 316 stolen cards were Russian issued, claiming this is due to the relatively low GDP of the country that makes Russian citizens less attractive targets.