The press is widely reporting the Wikileaks postings of John Podesta's emails.  John Podesta is Hillary Clinton's campaign manager.  How was John Podesta's email account compromised? The Associated Press provides a step-by-step account of how, it appears, Podesta's emails were stolen. Step 1. The hackers sent Podesta an email telling that someone was trying to log into his gmail account and he should reset his password. This is the email that is posted in Wikileaks:   Step 2. Podesta, to his credit, sent this to his IT experts for advice. Step 3. Clinton's campaign help desk staffer Charles Delavan wrote [...]

Apache Corporation is an oil-production company based in Texas.In 2013, Apache was the victim of a Business Email Compromise (BEC). At the heart of the scheme was a spearphishing email that appeared to come from Apache's vendor Petrofac Limited. Apache’s accounts-payable department received an email from “petrofacltd.com”. Unfortunately for Apache, Petrofac's real domain is "pretrofac.com". The criminals created “petrofacltd.com” to deceive Apache's accounting personnel. The deception worked and Apache paid $7 million according to the updated payment instructions received from “petrofacltd.com”. Unremarkably, the real Petrofac complained about not getting paid. An investigation was conducted which revealed the email fraud. While some of the stolen money [...]

The news is full of reports about compromised emails of important public officials and political leaders.  While we don't know for sure who is behind the compromise of these emails, all indications are that the Russians are behind this.  One of the leading investigators of this problem is Crowdstrike, who waxes poetic about the sophistication and technical prowess of the attackers. What are these bad guys doing that requires the resources of a country?  Is this some kind of cyber atomic bomb coming out of a massive cyber Manhattan project? No. Ars Technica shows us exactly what the attackers are doing.  They [...]

Buzzfeed is reporting that U.S. Senate staffers recently received cybersecurity training. What was the substance of the training these key government employees received?  What can you learn from this? The answer: “Don’t click on spear phishing emails” All that is left to do is determine which ones are the spearphishing emails so that you don't click on them. That's not so easy to do because the bad guys write emails that look real!  Help unmask fake emails so that you don't click on phishing emails.  Use SP Guard.

The BBC is reporting that the World Anti-Doping Agency has been hacked.  The hackers have released the confidential medical records of Simone Biles and Serena Williams. Serena Williams 2015 Australian Open How could this happen?  Spearphishing.  The hackers infiltrated the World Anti-Doping Agency using spearphishing.

Interpark, the popular South Korean ecommerce site, has been compromised. According to Korea Herald, the bad guys stole over 26.6 pieces of personal information about more than 10 million Interpark registered users. The Korea Herald reports that according to the ICT Ministry and the Korea Communications Commission the bad guys used a spearphishing attack which targeted one employee. Using the access created by the initial spearphishing attack, the bad guys were able to spread malware throughout Interpark's network and steal the users' personal information.

This innocuous looking email: isn't innocuous at all. Researchers at F-Secure have linked this email to a coordinated cyberattack against the Department of Justice of the Philippines, the organizers of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit and a major international law firm. The attack methodology is the tried and true spearphishing attack. In this attack, the targeted person is tricked into installing Remote Access Trojan (RAT) that enables the attacker's remote command and control server. In this attack (like all spearphishing attacks), the victim was the agent of the attacker.  The attacker needed the victim to do three things for the attacker to evade [...]