The Associated Press reports that the FBI failed to warn government officials who were being targeted by Russian spearphishing attacks. One wonders what such a warning would say.  The FBI could revise the common warning, "Don't open suspicious emails." to "You are the target of an attack, don't open suspicious emails from Russians." Of course, a hallmark of Russian attacks is that they are well-crafted to be non-suspicious.  Such warnings offer little assistance in actually performing the task of spotting deceptive Russian emails. SP Guard helps users avoid deceptive emails.  

On October 16, 2017, the Department of Homeland Security issued Binding Operational Directive BOD-18-01 directing federal agencies to adopt new cybersecurity measures. One of these measures, DMARC, is intended to fight phishing. It is good to see the government addressing spearphishing.  However, this measure will quickly prove to be ineffective against spearphishing attacks. Why? Because, as the DMARC specification tells us, …DMARC can only be used to combat specific forms of exact-domain spoofing directly… DMARC does not attempt to solve all problems with spoofed or  otherwise fraudulent email.  In particular, it does not address the use of visually similar domain names ("cousin [...]

As we noted yesterday, Jimmy Kimmell poked fun at the President's Homeland Security Advisor for opening and responding to a spam email.  But is it really so unusual to interact with spam?  Today we filed our annual insurance audit.  Where's my important confirmation from the insurance company?  Or, there it is -- in my spam folder! Luckily, I use SP Guard.  I have no concerns about this being a dangerous email because SP Guard identifies it as a real email from Hartford Insurance.

The  Hacker News is reporting on a spearphishing attack that has compromised over 1 million people. How could this happen?  Over one million users use the popular chrome extension "Web Developer." The bad guys spearphished the developer of "Web Developer" and then used the access they gained from spearphishing to modify "Web Developer" and push the modified code to over 1 million users.  The malicious version of "Web Developer" turned the victim's web browser into an advertising nightmare by injecting ads on web pages.  It took several hours for the real developer of "Web Developer" to correct the problem and issue [...]

Marcus Hutchins is the 23 year old cybersecurity researcher who is credited with finding the killswitch to the WannaCry ransomware attack. Marcus Hutchins He was arrested yesterday (August 2, 2017) at the airport when he was preparing to leave the U.S. after attending the DefCon hacking conference in Las Vegas.  His arrest is reported on Motherboard. The July 11, 2017,  Indictment alleges that Hutchins was involved with the Kronos banking trojan. Of course, Kronos malware can only do evil if it is installed on the target systems.  Like so much malicious software, Kronos is installed through phishing email [...]

The New York Daily News is reporting that Acting State Supreme Court Justice Lori Sattler was the victim of an email scam while trying to sell her apartment and buy another.     Justice Sattler The press report says that a person posing as the Justice's lawyer sent her an email with payment instructions. Believing the email came from her lawyer, the justice wired $1,057,500 to the account specified in the email. The money was then transferred to Commerce Bank of China. The Justice was the victim of a crime of deception perpetrated using email.  This crime relied on the fact that [...]