MailGuard Blog

Does defeating cybercriminals mean we need to try thinking like they do?

The kind of people who commit cybercrime aren’t CEO material. They aren’t even necessarily the I.T. whiz or hacker type; cybercrime doesn’t require a serious technical skill set. The crooks behind online fraud attacks are using technology, certainly, but they are consumers, not experts.

It's been a huge year from the POV of cybersecurity. The number and sophistocation of email scams we've seen in 2017 is a sobering reminder that cybercrime is a growing problem. One of the reasons that email scams persist is that they have a high success ratio.

You may have heard of the ‘dark web’ but to most of us it’s just a sinister sounding name. For the world of organised crime though, the dark web is a one-stop robbing shop. It’s a place where crooks can buy ready-made software for extortion, fraud, and intelligence gathering.

Over the years, working with people in the cybersecurity field and talking to them about their experiences I’ve heard some hair-raising stories.

Last year I was at a business leaders conference in Singapore, and I got talking to a guy who had learned the hard way how destructive cybercrime can be.

Commonwealth Bank is one of Australia’s best known and most trusted brands, so it’s irresistible to phishing scammers.

Today, criminal-intent emails were detected by MailGuard using CommBank branding to try and trick millions of bank customers into giving up their credit card details.

This morning MailGuard detected a new phishing email using a fake message pretending to be from telecommunications company Vocus.

The initial contact with the intended victim is an email which asks them to advise the payment status of an ‘attached invoice.’

How often do you or your employees use a personal phone to access work emails, calendars and applications?