Category: Alerts and warnings

From gov.uk / Student Loans Company

At the start of the 24/25 academic year, the Students Loans Company (SLC) is reminding students to be vigilant of smishing scams.

Scammers target students at this time of year as they receive their first maintenance loan payment. SLC is expecting to pay £2bn to students over the autumn term and last year it stopped £2.9m of maintenance loan payments being taken by smishing and phishing scams, where students received and acted on false communications.

Smishing, which is fraud involving text messages, is currently the most popular form of scam, with students usually being asked to click a link to complete a task – for example verifying bank details or confirming their personal information, providing an opportunity for a payment to be diverted to a scammer’s bank account.

Read more…

by Morgan Brazier

A moderately sophisticated phishing campaign has been observed targeting multiple universities including Bournemouth University, Brighton and Warwick.

The email and subsequent registration portal masquerades as a university yearbook to harvest personally identifiable information (PII) and card details, tricking users into submitting payment and sensitive information by creating convincing emails already containing their first name and university.

Similar campaigns have been seen this time last year from different domains.

If you have been affected by this phishing campaign it is recommended you report the incident to both Action Fraud and the BU IT help desk:

https://www.actionfraud.police.uk

https://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/news/2019-03-04/contacting-it-service-desk

From cointelegraph.com

Opportunistic hackers are increasingly seeking to dupe victims using websites or applications purporting to provide information or services pertaining to coronavirus.

Cybersecurity threat researchers, DomainTools, have identified that the website coronavirusapp.site facilitates the installation of a new ransomware called “CovidLock.”

The website prompts its visitors to install an Android application that purportedly tracks updates regarding the spread of COVID-19, claiming to notify users when an individual infected with coronavirus is in their vicinity using heatmap visuals.

Read more…

For the past couple of days BU has been targeted through spear phishing emails. Users should be alert on any emails coming from student accounts with a subject related to academic activities (projects, guest lecturers, etc.)

Following this statement from tvlicensing.co.uk, customers who used their services to pay for their tv licensing fees between 29 August until around 3.20pm on 5 September 2018 may have their details compromised. The company reports that this was due to a technical update and during that period the transactions were not as secure as intended.

From darkreading.com

Researchers at Check Point Software Technologies say they have discovered a dangerous weakness in the WhatsApp messaging app that gives threat actors a way to manipulate content in private and group conversations on the platform without raising any red flags.

The security vendor this week published a report demonstrating how an adversary could exploit the issue to change the identity of a message sender, alter the text of message replies, and send private messages spoofed as a public message to individual participants in a group.

More information here

From securityaffairs.co

Researchers found critical vulnerabilities in PGP and S/MIME Tools, immediately disable and/or uninstall tools that automatically decrypt PGP-encrypted email.

If you are one of the users of the email encryption tools Pretty Good Privacy and S/MIME there is an important warning for you.

A group of European security expert has discovered a set of critical vulnerabilities in PGP and S/Mime encryption tools that could reveal your encrypted emails in plain text, also the ones you sent in the past.

More information here