Author: HackWatchit

By the end of July 2025, all Microsoft Defender for Office 365 customers should be protected from email bombing attacks by default, Microsoft has announced on Monday. What is email bombing? Email bombing (aka spam bombing) is an attack technique that results in large volumes of email messages being sent to one or more target email addresses. It used to be performed by signing the target email address up to email list subscriptions, but these days it’s usually performed with the help of bot(net)s, and the content of the emails can be anything that’s likely to fool email defenses. Email…

Thank you to our sponsor, Plotly, for making this ebook possible. There was a time when building a clean, insightful report felt like the pinnacle of data work. Get the KPIs right, add a few compelling visualizations, and you’d have a deliverable that could drive decisions and earn buy-in. But the bar has moved. Today, static reports and post-hoc summaries don’t go far enough. Business questions evolve in real time. Stakeholders expect systems that offer context and recommendations. Data science has outgrown the tooling that was designed to wrap up analysis, and it needs tools that can stay in the…

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has issued a warning about a scam where criminals pretend to be health insurance companies or their fraud investigators. These fraudsters are sending emails and text messages to individuals and healthcare providers, making them believe the messages are from legitimate health authorities. The aim is to pressure people into revealing private health information, medical records, or banking details. They might also try to get money for supposed overpayments or services not covered by insurance. Understanding the Scam’s Tactics These messages, as per the FBI, are carefully crafted to look official, often designed to create…

 Melisa Wachs // Many, many years ago John laid on the bathroom floor during his wedding reception near tears and screaming. This was not due to any amount of alcohol […] The post For the Record – My First Confession appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) announced coordinated law enforcement actions against North Korean government’s fund raising operations using remote IT workers. North Korean workers use stolen or fake identities created with the help of AI tools to get hired by more than 100 companies in the U.S., believing they employed experts from other Asian countries or the U.S. Their salaries are usually sent to the DPRK regime. According to court documents, two individuals, Kejia Wang and Zhenxing “Danny” Wang, compromised the identities of more than 80 U.S. citizens to help North Korean workers obtain rmeote jobs at U.S. companies. The two created…

Cloudflare is now the first major internet infrastructure company to block AI crawlers by default when they try to access website content without permission or payment. Starting today, website owners can choose whether to allow AI crawlers and set rules for how their content is used. “Original content is what makes the Internet one of the greatest inventions in the last century, and it’s essential that creators continue making it. AI crawlers have been scraping content without limits. Our goal is to put the power back in the hands of creators, while still helping AI companies innovate. This is about…

GDPR violations prompt Germany to push Google and Apple to ban DeepSeek AI Pierluigi Paganini July 01, 2025 Germany asked Google and Apple to remove DeepSeek AI from their app stores, citing GDPR violations over unlawful data collection and transfers to China. The Berlin Commissioner for Data Protection requested Google and Apple to remove the DeepSeek AI app from their app stores due to GDPR violations. On May 6, 2025, Berlin’s Data Protection Commissioner asked the company to remove its apps from German stores, stop illegal data transfers to China, or meet legal transfer requirements. After non-compliance, the Commissioner used Art.…

In brief The FBI has charged a Baldwinsville, NY man with wire fraud and money laundering over an alleged scheme to launder funds from scams into Bitcoin. Tushal Rathod is accused of masterminding a scheme involving counterfeit checks and business email compromise scams. The laundered funds were allegedly sent through a network of bank accounts at different financial institutions, with $1.2 million worth of BTC sent to external addresses. The FBI has charged a man from New York State with generating $1.7 million in revenues through counterfeit checks and business email compromise scams—and then converting most of the ill-gotten gains…

The challenge: Escalating bot threats leading to resource drain, skewed data, & fraudulent transactions Etsy wanted to solve for the growing presence of “scrapers” which would gather information on publicly visible content by pretending to be shoppers. Mike Adler, the company’s Principal Systems Architect, recalls the early days when bot traffic was more of an inconvenience than a serious problem. “It started as something harmless we would notice, maybe a bit of annoyance, but we tolerated it,” he says. For many years, the bot activity was not critical enough to warrant interventions which would run the risk of bothering real…