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Catch of the Day: Dick’s Phish

Examples of clever phish that made it past my anti-spam nets and into my inbox. Some are contributed by clients or readers like you, and other reliable sources on the Internet.

You can send phishing samples to me at phish@wyzguys.com.

My intention is to provide a warning and show current examples of phishing scams, related articles, and education about how these scams and exploits work, and how to detect them in your inbox. If the pictures are too small or extend off the page, double clicking the image will display them in a photo viewer app.


Dick’s Sporting Goods Cyber Attack Underscores Importance of Email Security and Internal Controls

The recent cyber attack on Dick’s Sporting Goods makes it clear that email played a critical role and emphasizes the need for better security controls.

Dick’s Sporting Goods is a $12 billion company with more than 800 stores across the United States. That measure of success made the retailer the target of a recent cyber attack. A filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) notified them of a cyber attack involving “unauthorized third-party access to its information systems, including portions of its systems containing certain confidential information.”

While the filing provides no details, an anonymous source told Bleeping Computer that “email systems had been shut down, likely to isolate the attack, and all employees had been locked out of their accounts. IT staff is now manually validating employees’ identities on camera before they can regain access to internal systems.”

With no other details, I can make some educated guesses on what happened:

  • Email is involved – whether this initially started with a phishing attack or the compromise of a credential (which still usually involves phishing).
  • At least one email account was likely compromised – shutting down the email system sounds like a lack of visibility into which accounts have been compromised
  • Impersonation of employees may have been involved – the mention of “manually validating employee identities” make me think this may be similar to the attack that hit the MGM in Vegas where someone used social engineering to pretend to be an actual employee.

All these factors add up to the need for effective Human Risk Management to ensure that IT staff and employees alike don’t fall for social engineering, phishing, credential attacks, and more.

Blog post with links:
https://blog.knowbe4.com/dicks-sporting-goods-suffers-cyber-attack

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About the Author:

I am a cybersecurity and IT instructor, cybersecurity analyst, pen-tester, trainer, and speaker. I am an owner of the WyzCo Group Inc. In addition to consulting on security products and services, I also conduct security audits, compliance audits, vulnerability assessments and penetration tests. I also teach Cybersecurity Awareness Training classes. I work as an information technology and cybersecurity instructor for several training and certification organizations. I have worked in corporate, military, government, and workforce development training environments I am a frequent speaker at professional conferences such as the Minnesota Bloggers Conference, Secure360 Security Conference in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, the (ISC)2 World Congress 2016, and the ISSA International Conference 2017, and many local community organizations, including Chambers of Commerce, SCORE, and several school districts. I have been blogging on cybersecurity since 2006 at http://wyzguyscybersecurity.com

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