Cybersecurity news
The Great Phishing Fail
Anna Collard, SVP Content Strategy & Evangelist at KnowBe4 Africa. In 2021, phishing attacks increased by 7.3% according to the ESET Threat Report, and the Cisco 2021 Cybersecurity threat trends report revealed that around 86% of organisations had at least one person click a phishing link. This echoes the findings of recent KnowBe4 Security Awareness Research that found people keep clicking – on fake emails from HR, the business and IT. As Anna Collard, SVP Content Strategy & Evangelist at KnowBe4 Africa, points out, the majority of top email categories that people fall for are those that fit in to everyday life – invoices, purchase orders, shared files, and COVID-19 related topics. “As our quarterly report on the top-clicked phishing tests shows, the emails that catch people are t...
How the Russia-Ukraine War Could Affect Cybercrime
Image sourced from Packetlabs. Russia’s war on Ukraine and its increasingly isolated internet environment could drive Russian cybercriminals to think outside the box and launch new forms of cyber attacks. This is according to Nclose’s Co-Founder & Technical Director, Martin Potgieter, who says speculation and concern is mounting around the world, over what Russia’s cyber crime syndicates’ next moves will be. “Currently, the cybercrime focus appears to be predominantly between Russia and Ukraine cybercrime groups and governments. While this is strictly speaking cyber warfare, it could quickly spread elsewhere. “What we are seeing is that a few of these cybercrime groups are either taking sides or imploding amongst themselves due to their Eastern European links with one another,” says Po...
Ransomware Attacks on Healthcare Organizations Increased 94%, According to Sophos
Image sourced from Alpine Security. Sophos, a global leader in next-generation cybersecurity, has published a new sectoral survey report, “The State of Ransomware in Healthcare 2022.” The findings reveal a 94% increase in ransomware attacks on the organizations surveyed in this sector. In 2021, 66% of healthcare organizations were hit; 34% were hit the previous year. The silver lining, however, is that healthcare organizations are getting better at dealing with the aftermath of ransomware attacks, according to the survey data. The report shows that 99% of those healthcare organizations hit by ransomware got at least some their data back after cybercriminals encrypted it during the attacks. Additional ransomware findings for the healthcare sector include: Healthcare organizations had the se...
R110,000 Cybersecurity Scholarship Launched for Women of Colour in South Africa
Image sourced from OpportunitiesNB. KnowBe4, provider of one of the world’s largest security awareness training and simulated phishing platforms, today announced it has partnered with the Centre for Cyber Safety and Education to launch the KnowBe4 Women of Colour in Cybersecurity (South Africa) Scholarship. The recipient of this award will receive an R110,000 ($7,090.68) scholarship on behalf of KnowBe4 as well as an (ISC)2 certification education package. This is a one-time award and students may reapply each year in the future to be considered for another scholarship. Applicants will be scored in three categories: passion, merit and financial need. This scholarship aims to assist in diversifying the cybersecurity workforce in South Africa among women. According to the SANS Institute, as ...
These Are the Cyber Dangers Still Faced by SA’s SMEs
Image sourced from Pixabay Internet security provider Kaspersky says that small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and other small businesses in South Africa are still facing many threats from cyber criminals and threat actors. What’s worse is that many small business owners do not use or believe it important to use cybersecurity services to secure their businesses. As commerce is moving ever continually online, this disregard for IT security continues to be exploited by cybercriminals. Kaspersky researchers assessed the dynamics of attacks on small and medium-sized businesses between January and April 2022 and the same period in 2021, to identify which threats pose an increasing danger to entrepreneurs. Cyber Threats Still Being Faced by SMEs in South Africa: In 2022, the number of Trojan...
How Loadshedding Can Cause Cyber Security Risks
Image sourced from Forbes. Work-from-anywhere (WFA) model have greatly expanded in South Africa in recent weeks, as loadshedding forces remote workers to seek power from a multitude of sources, in malls and coffee shops, meaning they may be alternating between mobile phones, tablets and laptops across any number of potentially unsecured public Wi-Fi hotspots. This mobility increases the cyber security risks presented by all these devices that are often poorly secured to begin with. Smartphones, in particular, have become a critical part of the remote workforce toolkit. They are such an integral part of each person’s daily routine, people may regard them as trusted and safe. As a channel to your personal data, banking and accounts, and a link to your work and business data, smartphones...
Kaspersky Launches Online Ransomware Response Training Course
Sourced from Hypertext Kaspersky, the Russia-based, self-styled independent cybersecurity and online safety provider, has today announced the launch of a new Windows Incident Response training course. This is in order to offer in-house cybersecurity teams and InfoSec professionals an opportunity to expand their analytical skills in the incident response domain, especially in the midst of a ransomware attack. The entire course can be completed online. According to the recent global Kaspersky survey conducted among senior non-IT management and business owners, 73% of firms can’t handle a ransomware attack alone or with the help of regular IT service providers. Over recent years the lack of skilled technical staff who can detect and respond to complex incidents, along with a lack of visibilit...
What Happens When Cybercriminals Impersonate CEOs?
Image sourced from Feed Navigator. Traditional payment fraud has been rife for some time, where the cybercriminal impersonates the CEO, or other senior members of staff, to convince the finance department to make an urgent payment to either a new supplier or update their bank details. Now over the past month, there has been an increase in an evolved method of change of bank details or payment fraud cyber-attack. This new trend involves an internal change of bank details, mostly for the CEO. The change of bank details fraud uses fake banking confirmation letters and the trust of finance people to update an existing supplier’s details. The growing number of successful attacks have proven to be very costly to businesses of all sizes. Owing to this, many businesses have now implemented stronge...
Distributed Cloud WAAP Evolves F5’s Security-As-A-Service Offering Further for Securing Enterprise Apps
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Omnis Security from NETSCOUT: Protect Your Network from the Threats You Can’t See
On 09 December 2021, the world was alerted to the Log4j vulnerability [CVE-2021-44228 aka Log4Shell]. It is likely that threat actors already knew about the vulnerability before this date, says Tom Bienkowski, NETSCOUT Product Marketing Director, because it’s been reported that the vulnerability had been exposed much earlier in Minecraft chat forums. How does Log4j work – and what lessons does it bring? Log4j, which is open-source software provided by the Apache Software Foundation, records errors and routine system operations and sends diagnostic messages about them to system administrators and users. A common example of Log4j is when a user types in or clicks on a bad weblink and they receive a 404 error message. The web server running the domain of the attempted weblink sends a message ...
Vodacom & Accenture Join Forces for Bespoke Cybersecurity
South African telco Vodacom and Ireland-based IT services company Accenture have partnered to launch Vodacom Managed Security services through Vodacom Business. The partnership was publically announced yesterday via press release. Vodacom Managed Security services is a new solution that creates custom cybersecurity modules for small businesses in South Africa. According to Vodacom, South Africa has among the most cybercrime incidents in the world and a lack of sufficient investment in cybersecurity has led to this crisis. This is particularly true for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that simply don’t have the same human capital, technology assets, and financial resources as larger businesses. Vodacom Business and Accenture have launched the Vodacom Managed Security Services to o...
Bad Actors Innovate, Extort & Launch 9.7M DDoS Attacks
In March 2022 we released our 2H 2021 Threat Intelligence Report. The report covers worldwide distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack activity during 2021—particularly during the second half of the year. As always, it’s chock-full of DDoS attack statistics, trends, and insights from our elite NETSCOUT ATLAS Security Engineering and Research Team (ASERT). Key findings include: DDoS attacks continued to exceed pre-pandemic levels. During the second half of 2021, cybercriminals launched approximately 4.4 million DDoS attacks, bringing the total number of DDoS attacks in 2021 to 9.75 million. These attacks represent a 3 percent decrease from the record number set during the height of the pandemic but continue at a pace that’s 14 percent above pre-pandemic levels. DDoS extortion and ransomw...
