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Security Bytes
SMEs lose $ 40 million to cyberfrauds, phishing attacks on rise
According to Websense's latest security round-up, the security
breaches that made it to the top of the news included FBI's revelation of losses
suffered by SMEs to cyberfrauds amounting to $ 40 million, a volley of phishing
attacks on UK nationals and the online disclosure of thousands of Hotmail passwords.
The FBI announced that cyber crooks have stolen $40 million
from small and mid-sized firms in the US. The perpetrators stole online banking
credentials by using malicious software distributed via spam. This information
was then used to make a series of unauthorized bank transfers from the victims
to money mules, who then wired the money to the bad guys after taking a commission.
There was a slew of phishing attacks on UK nationals purporting
to be from the HMRC (the UK's tax collection agency) offering tax rebates-but
first asking the victim to enter their bank account or credit card details.
A total of 83,000 emails were discovered, with 10,000 of them arriving in just
one day.
Around 10,000 Hotmail passwords were posted online by an
anonymous user. These passwords were likely obtained via a phishing scheme.
An analysis of the passwords has been posted on Acunetix: 69% of the passwords
were between 6 and 9 characters long, the most common password was 123456, and
all the top 20 passwords that did not involve numbers were dictionary words.
Other key trends for the past month included:
- 81.7% of all email was spam
- 83.3% of spam included an embedded URL
- 1.7% of spam emails were phishing attacks
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