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Phishing Scams, Corona Anti-Virus, Free Ransomware Decryption & More: Cybercrime in the Era of Covid19

These are undoubtedly strange times we are living in, with unprecedented changes taking place in our lives all over the globe in order to fight the pandemic that is Covid19. Suddenly, a sizeable chunk of the workforce is working from home, in many cases for the first time. Companies are scrambling to put in place plans to accommodate this, working out whether to allow users to use their own devices, or provide company laptops or desktops for any displaced staff. Moreover, many people are out of work altogether and confined to their homes, spending significantly more time than usual browsing the internet, looking for the next clue online that will bring some certainty to their lives around the crisis they are living through.

With such a shift in online activity comes great challenges for technology companies and IT teams in ensuring their users are safe and their precious company data is secure – meanwhile cyber criminals have seen crisis as opportunity; the misfortune of others is a chance for them to take advantage of the confusion and make some extra money.

Ransomware has crippled various hospitals in the past, including many NHS Trust hospitals which were caught out by the infamous 2017 WannaCry attack.

The Covid19 pandemic is the perfect storm for cyber criminals to up the ante. Confusion reigns among users and misinformation is rife. Users who would normally be at work are now accessing the internet from home devices, which typically are not sitting behind the advanced firewalls, email filters and policies put in place by their organisations to protect them against malicious activity.

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Irishman Arrested for Running Website That Sold Stolen Credentials

A man from Fermanagh has been arrested along with a Dutch national (both aged 22) for their part in running the illicit credential marketplace WeLeakInfo. A joint collaboration between law enforcement in the UK, Northern Ireland, Germany, the US and the Netherlands was kicked off in the summer of 2019, with the site alleged to have over 12 billion credentials for sale, from various nefarious sources.

The domain seizure notice displayed on the website weleakinfo.com after the operation.
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Shane Chambers No Comments

Irish Businesses Hit by Invoice Redirect Scams, Gardaí Warn

Gardaí have reported a sharp increase in the number of invoice redirect and CEO fraud-style attacks on Irish businesses in the last few months. “We are getting a couple of cases every week now”, according to Detective Superintendent Pat Lordan, who said that both small and large companies are being hit for amounts ranging from €10,000 into the millions.

Staff should be very wary of any requests to change payment details from suppliers, and are advised to pick up the phone and speak to someone they know first.
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281 Arrests Made in Massive Business Email Compromise Ring Bust

In a global sting, named Operation reWired, authorities in the US and around the world have arrested 281 individuals that were involved in a global Business Email Compromise (BEC) scam. The ring had been under investigation for months, during which they were found to have hijacked email accounts belonging to company executives, impersonated staff and ultimately tricked unsuspecting employees into wiring millions in funds into the group’s accounts.

Business Email Compromise is a common tactic by cyber criminals which users social engineering to trick staff into transferring money directly to them
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Shane Chambers No Comments

Passwords Are Out, Passphrases Are In: How to Keep Your Accounts Secure in 2019

Just a few years ago, if you asked someone how to create a safe password, most people would all say the same thing: Use a mixture of upper- and lower-case letters, symbols and numbers so that it’s too complex for hackers to guess, and you should be safe.

Fast-forward to 2019, however, and you will find more and more people recommending that you use a ‘passphrase’ instead. But what is a passphrase, and why are experts all recommending we use them instead of the traditional password?

Passphrases are believed to be more secure and easier to remember than traditional passwords

There are two main reasons that passwords are becoming outdated – cyber criminals using increasingly sophisticated tools to crack them, and plain old human error when people create them.

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