Billboards and digital real world advertising has raised many questions of privacy and anonymity in recent years. Until now, the primary concern has been (mostly) legal, yet potentially objectionable geolocation and user profiling. Bluetooth beacons work in tandem with geofenced billboards to send you offers. Stores follow your movements and tailor products

What would you do if a friend of yours set up a NSFW account, and then used it to follow you on Instagram? Would you check it out? We recently learned of a group of friends who had to ask themselves exactly that. Fortunately, they realised that something was off. The account wasn’t the real owner’s, it just used her identity and left her with

Facebook is once again the launchpad for a large-scale phishing campaign, according to researchers at PIXM. The campaign, which first shows signs of life back in September 2021, has generated millions of page views and ad referral revenue “estimated to be millions of USD at this scale of operation”. Credential harvesting on a grand scale Re

The FBI recently issued an announcement about a fraudulent scheme that proves there is no low that’s too low for scammers. “Criminal actors are taking advantage of the crisis in Ukraine by posing as Ukrainian entities needing humanitarian aid or developing fundraising efforts, including monetary and cryptocurrency donations,” the FBI sai

Today we took a look at a phishing mail pinning its hopes on a QR code linking to a bogus website. Scammers claim that your mail address has “not been registered for the 3D Secure Security Update”. 3D Secure phishing mail The mail reads as follows: Dear Sir / Madam, Our administration has shown that the data linked to this email address

The BBC has revealed details of how a food bank in the UK was conned out of about $63,000 (£50,000) by scammers who used two separate attacks to fleece their victims. A food bank is a way for people to ensure they don’t starve. They are a backstop during times of economic uncertainty, and have been hugely important during the pandemic. An attack on

Think of all the really common, very mundane things you search for of a tech nature. Drivers. Scanners. Printers. A broken photocopier. USB sticks not recognised. Activating a streaming service which refuses to play ball. Some of the above have many issues already with bogus search engine results and tech support scams. Streaming and other internet based

Experts investigate how stolen Facebook accounts are used as part of a well-established fraud industry inside Facebook. No eyebrows were raised in Quriums security operation center when the independent Philippine media outlet Bulatlat once again got DDoSed, as they are a frequent target of such digital attacks. However, when we noticed that the attack tra

I don’t know about you, but I open Instagram to look at cool photos of pets, not to make a fortune via suspicious claims of riches by strangers. Despite this, following someone whose photos I liked resulted in a very peculiar message. It’s possible I waved goodbye to a path to untold riches. Maybe if I’d stayed the course I’d now have my own “Become a

Agent Tesla is a well-known data stealer written in .NET that has been active since 2014 and is perhaps one of the most popular payloads observed in malspam campaigns. While looking for threats targeting Ukraine, we identified a group we call “Nigerian Tesla” that has been dabbling into phishing and other data theft activities for a number of

The wacky world of ape jpegs are at the heart of yet another increasingly bizarre internet scam, which contains malware, stolen accounts, a faint possibility of phishing, and zips full of ape pictures. The Ape Executives have a job offer you can, and must, refuse Lots of people with art profiles on social media in Japan and elsewhere have reported mes

Over the past few years, I’ve used Star Wars Day as a way to talk about two of my favourite things – Star Wars and cybersecurity. I wrote about scammers in 2020 and IoT in 2021, and I really thought I’d write about IoT again this year. After all, there’s no shortage of IoT blunders to talk about and tie into the Star Wars mythos. Instead, an article that I s

We tend to accept that younger folks are supposed to be more tech savvy, given they’ve grown up with computers and the Internet pretty much their whole lives. If you go back about 15 or so years, a lot of security advice focused on the “warning your grandmother away from scams” routine. The default assumption was that people over a certain age simply did

The invasion of Ukraine has been a money making opportunity for scammers since the moment it began: Fake donation sites, bogus Red Cross portals, phishing pages, the works. These scams can also be found on social media. Faking donations on Twitter Some users of social media have become very well-known for their tweets inside affected regions. Others

p>A scam is doing the rounds which begins with a text from what claims to be the US Postal Service. The SMS reads as follows: “[U.S. Postal Service] We’re sorry to let you know that your package could not be delivered. To reschedule a delivery please visit [bit(dot)ly]“ I’ve never received an SMS from the US Postal Service, but I have to im