About: Alex Harris

UK Stalkerware Usage Soars During Lockdown Anti-malware company Avast saw a sharp spike in the use of stalkerware during the UK’s pandemic lockdown, it revealed this week. Installations of online spying and stalking apps across the country rose 83% on average from March onward, compared to January and February. Stalkerware apps are unauthorized software applications introduced onto…

Researchers Find New Calendar-Based Phishing Campaign Researchers have once again spotted crooks using calendar invitations to mount phishing attacks. The Cofense Phishing Defense Center found the attack in enterprise email environments protected by Proofpoint and Microsoft, it announced last week. The phishing scam uses iCalendar, which is a media type that lets users store and exchange calendaring and scheduling…

Unauthorized Data Sharing Puts Companies at Risk Inappropriate data sharing continues to be a problem for companies, according to a survey from data discovery and auditing software vendor Netwrix. Although most companies have designated secure storage areas for their data, many find it leaking into insecure areas, its research found. A quarter of companies have discovered data stored…

Criminals Exploit Pandemic with Brute-Force RDP Attacks ESET is the latest security company to notice a sharp spike in RDP-based hacks over the last few months. The anti-malware company spotted a rise in the number of brute-force attacks using the remote access protocol, and said that cyber-criminals have been using it to distribute ransomware. The Remote Desktop Protocol…

Businesses Lack a Workable Ransomware Recovery Strategy More than a third of businesses do not have a ransomware emergency plan in place, or are not aware if one exists within their company. According to research from Ontrack of 484 organizations, 39% either did not have or were not unaware of a ransomware strategy, while 26% admitted they couldn’t…

NCSC: One Million Phishing Messages Reported in Two Months The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has announced that in just two months of its Suspicious Email Reporting Service being launched, it has received one million reports. According to a statement, the service, which was launched in April as part of the Government’s Cyber Aware campaign, receives a daily average of 16,500…

Twitter Data Leak Exposes Business Clients Twitter has contacted its business clients to warn them of a potential breach of their data. It said that email addresses, phone numbers and the last four digits of card numbers may have been accessed by others, thanks to a technology snafu which exposed the information. It meant that…

350,000 Social Media Influencers and Users at Risk Following Data Breach Personal data of an estimated 100,000 social media influencers has been accessed and partially leaked following a breach at social media marketing firm Preen.Me, Risk Based Security has discovered. The same breach has also led to more than 250,000 social media users having their information fully exposed…

COVID19 Attacks Still Less Than 2% of Total Threats COVID-19-themed cyber-attacks comprised only a tiny amount of overall threat volumes over the past four months despite sensational headlines, according to Microsoft. In comments echoing those it made at the start of the crisis, the Microsoft Threat Protection Intelligence Team claimed that even the peak of COVID-related attacks…