Scams are becoming more sophisticated over time, but this latest scam should be a wake-up call to all organizations and employees as to how far some scammers will go to damage your organization or its stakeholders.
A new phishing campaign is using WhatsApp messages to deliver malware, according to researchers at Microsoft. The attackers are attempting to trick users into installing malicious Visual Basic Script (VBS) files.
“The campaign relies on a combination of social engineering and living-off-the-land techniques,” Microsoft says. “It uses renamed Windows utilities to blend into normal system activity, retrieves payloads from trusted cloud services such as AWS, Tencent Cloud, and Backblaze B2, and installs malicious Microsoft Installer (MSI) packages to maintain control of the system. By combining trusted platforms with legitimate tools, the threat actor reduces visibility and increases the likelihood of successful execution.”
If a user falls for the phishing attack, the malicious VBS file creates a hidden folder on the infected system and creates renamed versions of legitimate Windows utilities to evade detection.
Microsoft offers the following advice to help organizations thwart these attacks:
New-school security awareness training can give your organization an essential layer of defense against social engineering attacks. KnowBe4 enables your workforce to make smarter security decisions every day. Over 65,000 organizations worldwide trust the KnowBe4 platform to strengthen their security culture and reduce human risk.
Microsoft has the story.
A new survey from LevelBlue has found that a majority of Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) believe the human-related elements of their cybersecurity strategies are falling short. These concerns are exacerbated by the emergence of new threats, such as AI-assisted attacks.
Each year, Identity Management Day (IMD) serves as a global reminder that managing digital identities is more than a technical requirement; it is a cornerstone of modern trust. Now in its sixth year, IMD continues to emphasize how identity itself is evolving, stretching beyond human users to encompass machines, automated agents, and even AI-generated personas.
You often hear companies touting that they are AI enabled. But most do not give you the results of how that new AI stacks up with their previous non-AI offerings. We have some early data and want to share it.
KnowBe4 was the first Human Risk Management (HRM) vendor to use AI. While our competitors have been touting the use of AI only since 2023 at the earliest, we have been using machine learning (ML), the backbone workhorse of AI, since early 2016 – for a decade! We were also the first HRM vendor to have multiple active AI agents in the market available for customers to use without requiring complicated hand-holding with customer support technicians. Today, we have over a dozen AI agents and more coming all the time.
A few months ago, we launched KnowBe4’s Artificial Intelligence Defense Agents (AIDA), and specifically, the AIDA Orchestration (AO) agent. It allows admins to successfully manage human risk with the power and efficiency of AI. Customers can choose to allow AI to orchestrate the management and running of our human risk management (HRM) platform. If enabled, AIDA will pick the training, pick the simulated phishing emails and messages to send, pick the landing pages, and send the remedial training, if needed, and more. You enable AO, and it does the rest.
It was in testing for a long time, learning, consuming data, and improving. We recently released it so that all of our customers can use it. The data from early users shows that letting AIDA take over your HRM program results in similar or better outcomes with less effort. Here is the data.
First, although we have over 70,000 customer organizations, only 810 of them have so far tried AO, although the numbers are steadily headed up. We expect a majority of our customers to enable AO over time as awareness of its existence and trust in it grows.
By Roger A. Grimes and Matthew Duren
