Award Honors Falk, Antispam Pioneer and a M3AAWG Founding Member

In the era of COVID-19, governments, a number of major tech companies, and small developers are creating contact tracing applications and tools in an attempt to continue containing the outbreak and re-open safely. 

Officials from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) this week teased future improvements to the agency’s recently introduced “Phish Scale” measurement system, which helps companies determine whether phishing emails are hard or easy for their employees to detect. 

The SolarWinds supply chain attack will likely prompt scores of compromised companies to send critical data breach notifications to their customers. But how many of these email notifications will go ignored, bounced or quarantined?

Emotive topics such as COVID-19 and the role of policing will be at the heart of this election, and these tense issues, alongside the highly polarized nature of the electorate, ensure there will be a fertile ground for misinformation campaigns from nation state actors seeking to influence the outcome of the election. Such a phenomenon was observed recently in the so-called ‘Brexit election’ in the UK in December 2019, following which the UK government’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) described Russia as a “highly capable cyber-actor.” 

As cybercrime spikes in the wake of COVID-19, BEC’s toll is expected to rise this year. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) recently issued a warning to businesses on the growing threat of BEC attacks using the pandemic as a backdrop for unusual requests like payments to a “new” vendor or a change of account information.

The top 20 universities based in the U.S. are failing to implement proper DMARC protections and policies, opening the door for fraudsters to spoof their email domains and convincingly impersonate them at a time when students are likely expecting to receive a wealth digital communications related to back-to-school instructions, researchers warn.