security news
Fintech PalmPay Celebrates Massive User Milestone in Nigeria
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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...
Mobile Malware Attacks Across Africa are on the Decline – Why It Isn’t a Good Thing
Image sourced from Sectigo. While analysing the threat landscape of African countries, Kaspersky experts saw a steady decline in attacks on mobile devices in the region, as cybercriminals consolidated their efforts to focus on more complicated, dangerous and profitable threats instead. These and other findings are featured in Kaspersky’s Mobile Threats in 2021 report. Overall, in 2021, South African users faced 38% less mobile malware attacks than in 2020, while other countries in the region have seen even more dramatic changes of their mobile threat landscape: Mozambique saw a 48% decrease, followed by Botswana (58%), Nigeria (59%), Ethiopia (69%) and Ghana (76%). The only countries where the share of attacks increased was Angola, where mobile malware actually grew by 12%. “Indeed, there ...
How to Protect Yourself from Gift Card Scams This Holiday Season
Image sourced from NorthJersey.com This holiday season checking off that gift list will look a little different than in past years. Many shoppers are planning to rely on e-commerce for a significant amount of their holiday shopping. Digital gift card sales are also likely to increase. However, given the spike in digital activity predicted over the holidays, cybercriminals, too, will be making their lists and checking them twice. It’s a particularly risky time of the year as shoppers of all ages (including some with less experience recognising digital threats) flock to search engines and online channels to place orders before holiday delivery date cutoffs. And opportunistic hackers know just how to create enticing, seasonally-appropriate lures—and even some of the simplest scams c...
How a Small Email Phish Can Become a Million Rand Ransom
Image sourced from Kaspersky. Cybercrime is smart, innovative, and agile. Cybercriminals are well-rewarded for their innovative attack vectors and have no incentive to stop finding inventive ways of penetrating systems and moving past the most vulnerable defences. According to Paul Grapendaal, Head of Managed Security Services at Nclose, there’s no standard playbook when it comes to penetrating a system successfully, but there are solid security steps that can mitigate risk and help the business manage the fallout. Steps that will help bolster your defences and ensure that one phish won’t cost your business millions. Paul Grapendaal, Head of Managed Security Services at Nclose. “There are obvious routes of attack, such as spear phishing, that are designed to focus on a target with the sole...
Altron Security Appoints New Managing Director
We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking “Accept All”, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies. However, you may visit “Cookie Settings” to provide a controlled consent. You Deserve to Make Money Even When you are looking for Dates Online. So we reimagined what a dating should be. It begins with giving you back power. Get to meet Beautiful people, chat and make money in the process. Earn rewards by chatting, sharing photos, blogging and help give users back their fair share of Internet revenue.
How Remote Work Makes Financial Insider Threats A Bigger Challenge
Image sourced from Finance Times. Now more than ever, insider threats pose a serious risk to financial institutions, especially those that have transitioned to alternate work environments to ensure business continuity, warns Fortinet. Fortinet’s 2020 Securing Remote Work Survey revealed that the shift to remote work was putting pressure on security teams and increasing the risk of breaches. In South Africa, studies have found that remote and hybrid models are here to stay, meaning organisations must make insider risk a priority, says Doros Hadjizenonos, Regional Sales Manager at Fortinet. With a 47% increase in just two years, insider threats are a significant and growing problem worldwide, exacerbated by the move to remote and hybrid work models. No organisation is immune to the...
Is South Africa a Playground for Cybercriminals?
The Attacks From All Angles 2021 Mid-year Cybersecurity Report by Trend Micro highlighted a 47% year-on-year increase in email threats as well as malicious files and URLs in the first quarter of 2021 globally. South Africa’s technology landscape is almost identical to that of other countries, which has seen black hat hackers using it as a testing ground for cybersecurity attacks before these are launched on their intended end-users. Ransomware Remains the Prime Threat Globally, ransomware remained the standout threat in the first half of the year. The pandemic has highlighted how easy it is to buy ransomware as a service (Raas) on the dark web. Africa accounted for 1.7% of these attacks, with 1.05% being targeted at South Africa. Our findings show that locally, South Africa was in the top ...
The New DDoS ‘Normal’ is Not Normal in Any Way
Image sourced from Shutterstock. Threat actors will never turn down an opportunity for innovation, and the COVID-19 pandemic has provided an enormous such opportunity. We are seeing this quite clearly in the numbers coming through – and the new ‘normal’ around distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks is not normal at all. So says Carole Hildebrand, Senior Strategic Marketing Writer at NETSCOUT, a leading global provider of service assurance, security and business analytics. Writing in a recent blog, she explains, “After an astonishingly active first quarter of DDoS attack activity, things calmed down a bit for the second quarter of 2021. Unfortunately, ‘calmed down’ is a relative term.” NETSCOUT decided to compare the numbers of DDoS attacks during the COVID-19 era of 2020 and 2021 thu...
Apple Issues Urgent Spyware Fix – Update Your iPhone Now
Image sourced from Unsplash. Apple has released an urgent update for its iPhone software that addresses a critical vulnerability that has already been exploited by a notorious surveillance software, according to independent researchers. CNN reports that researchers from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab have said the software exploit has been in use since February and has been used to deploy the so-called ‘Pegasus,’ spyware made by the Israeli firm NSO Group that has allegedly been used to gather information from journalists and human rights advocates in several countries. The urgent update issued by Apple fixed an exploit in the iMessage software that was allowing hackers to infiltrate a user’s phone without the user clicking on any links, according to Citizen Lab. Apple has since c...
11 Critical Steps Security Officers Need to Take During a Ransomware Attack
Sourced from Kaspersky Ransomware attacks have increased in volume, morphing and evolving through the years, especially recently, into the debilitating attacks we see today. According to a recent Global Threat Landscape Report from FortiGuard Labs, ransomware attacks increased sevenfold in the last half of 2020 and became even more disruptive. Recently, a massive ransomware attack on IT services provider Kaseya resulted in widespread threats against companies across 17 countries. Tactics from threat actors continue to shift and defenders need to not only continue to get the “basics” of defensive strategies correct but continuously evaluate their own organisation’s security policies to ensure they still provide adequate responses against today’s ransomware threat actors. CISOs are...
IT Teams Facing Cyber Threats in 2020 – 5 Vital Insights
Image sourced from CIO. “Around the world, 2020 was an unprecedented year for IT teams,” said Chester Wisniewski, principal research scientist, Sophos. IT professionals played a vital role in helping organizations to keep going despite the restrictions and limitations necessitated by COVID-19. Among other things, they enabled education institutions to move learning online, retailers to switch to online transactions, healthcare organizations to deliver digital services and care under incredibly tough circumstances, and ensured public entities could continue to provide essential services. Much of this will have been done at high speed, with limited equipment and resources available and while facing a rising tide of cyberattacks against the network, endpoints and employees. To say things were...
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