The PhishLabs Blog

The past few years has seen an explosion of cyber attack activity in the healthcare industry.

But that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Healthcare records are a goldmine for enterprising hackers, and with low security budgets across the industry it’s no wonder that healthcare organizations are considered a soft target.

A cursory glance at the industry’s security profile tells us everything we need to know. There are weaknesses everywhere, and hackers all over the world know it.

Incredibly, from a single successful healthcare breach, a hacker stands to earn anything from $285,000 to $1.7 million.

At this point, everybody knows phishing is a threat.

But then, it’s difficult to deny. As Verizon points out, over 90 percent of data breaches include a phishing or social engineering component, including many of the high profile breaches we all read about each week.

In fact, from a security perspective, phishing is the single greatest threat to most organizations, whether they’re tiny family owned businesses or huge multinational conglomerates.

So what are most organizations doing to defend against phishing?

The fact that hackers are increasingly targeting mobile devices isn’t exactly a secret.

And really, it’s not surprising either. After all, most of us are practically glued to our smartphones throughout the day.

An SMS arrived? Better read it straight away.

New email? Let me at it.

Somebody I don’t care about updated their Facebook status? Great, let’s see what they’re up to.

It used to be said that the only certain things in life were death and taxes.

But this adage is in desperate need of an update. In the age of technology, the only certain things in life are death, taxes, and phishing scams.

And scams targeting taxpayers and tax preparers are just the tip of the iceberg. This tax season, schools, nonprofits, NGOs, state/local governments, and aid organizations have also found themselves the targets of wide ranging tax and W-2 phishing scams. 

On May 29, a post was published on Pastebin [What is Pastebin?] in which an anonymous author claimed to have phished an email account of Joseph Opacki, our VP of Threat Research, and announced unidentified PhishLabs data for sale. As of May 31 at 5 PM Eastern Time (US), we have found no evidence that any systems have been compromised. 

Historically, security awareness training (SAT) in the healthcare industry… isn’t great. In fact, if you start talking about SAT to a healthcare CISO, you can see the frustration on their face almost immediately.

Back in February we attended HIMSS, one of the biggest healthcare IT shows in the US. We wanted to find out exactly what healthcare providers needed from a SAT program, and show them that (done properly) SAT can have a tremendous positive effect on the operational security of healthcare organizations.

When most people think about cyber risk, they think primarily of their organization’s servers, PCs, and laptops, and how they might be vulnerable to attack.

But in recent years, the way in which users interact with the outside world has changed. In March this year, for the first time ever, Android overtook Windows to claim the largest share of Internet traffic.

And naturally, where users go, threat actors will surely follow.

Since May 9, PhishLabs has tracked multiple phishing campaigns that uses DocuSign branding that lures victims into downloading malicious files.  These campaigns followed a breach of a DocuSign database containing user email addresses.  Each of the campaigns associated with this breach contain similar, yet distinct, characteristics.  The third, and most recent, campaign was launched on May 17. 

In the fight against phishing, there’s far more to think about than simply blocking malicious email.

In fact, as a security vendor, our analysts spend a huge amount of time trying to disrupt the phishing landscape in a way that makes all of us safer.