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Across the country, Canadians are moving out of cities in droves to stretch their legs and call a larger plot of land home. For those embracing the work-from-home lifestyle, they no longer need to live near metro-area offices in expensive shoebox apartments and condos. According to Statistics Canada, 50,000 people moved out of Toronto and nearly 25,000 people migrated from Montréal to suburban areas from July 2019 to July 2020. 

The increased demand for suburban housing is making the Canadian real estate market a mad dash for limited supply. Additionally, some families who are out of work are struggling to keep their homes and are resorting to unsafe measures to keep a roof over their heads. 

Leave it to scammers and identity thieves to pounce on a vulnerable situation. Scammers and identity thieves are increasingly taking advantage of unsuspecting homeowners, and in some cases, selling homes without the rightful owners even realizing it. 

Be on the lookout for these three Canadian real estate scams. 

1. Loan Fraud 

Foreclosure occurs when a homeowner can no longer afford to pay their mortgage, so the lending institution takes over homeownership with the right to sell it. When homeowners are facing the prospect of having to move out, they may seek dubious loans to help them bridge the gap. Loan fraud is when a scammer pretends to extend a gracious loan. In exchange for the loan, the scammer may ask for the title of the home. With the title in hand, the thief may stop sending loan payments to the homeowner and instead resell or remortgage the property.  

Not being able to make mortgage payments is a desperate situation, which causes struggling homeowners to make dramatic decisions. Before agreeing to any type of loan, homeowners must ask themselves if the terms of the loan are too good to be true. In cases of fake loans, they often advertise an incredibly low-interest rate. It is best to trust your financial matters to accredited institutions.

2. Title Fraud

Title fraud is when someone steals the title of the home, usually by impersonating the homeowner. Once they have the title, the thief may attempt to sell the home or apply for a mortgage against it. In March 2021, the Times Colonist reported that a thief impersonated a British Columbian homeowner in order to transfer the home’s title to someone else’s name. Then, the thief tried to sell the home behind the rightful homeowner’s back. It was only when a neighbor alerted the real homeowner about the for-sale sign that they realized that their home could have been sold without their permission. 

The best way to defend against title fraud is to keep your personal information as private as possible. Title fraud is closely related to identity theft, and fraudsters may gain access to your personal information through phishing methods. Phishing is a tactic where cybercriminals trick people into giving up personal details, including full names, birthdays, and financial information. Statistics Canada calculates that 34% of Canadians have experienced a phishing attempt since the beginning of the pandemic. This statistic emphasizes the importance of constant vigilance concerning your most sensitive personal information. 

3. Mortgage Fraud 

Mortgage fraud is a term that can apply to untruthful lenders who attempt to swindle cash from unsuspecting buyers or pitch mortgage terms that fall outside of the buyer’s means. The Financial Services Commission of Ontario lists several warning signs of mortgage fraud. For example, lenders who do not have your best interests in mind may ask for cash fees and upfront payments. 

Again, it is best to only trust accredited financial institutions with your mortgages and loans. Research the institution before signing any contract. If the mortgage terms are too good to be true, it probably is. There are several online mortgage calculators that can give you an idea of the type of mortgage you can afford. Before entering any talks with a lender, conduct some research beforehand so you can spot unreasonable terms.   

Also, an unscrupulous lender may try to hurry you along but also take a long time responding to your calls and emails. If you feel pressured or unsure at any point, remember that there are plenty of fish in the sea. Ask your friends or family for lender recommendations to make sure that you are not tricked into mortgage fraud, the consequences of which could follow you for years. 

How to Protect Your Real Estate Investments

• Invest in title insurance. To protect yourself from fraud involving the title of your house, consider investing in title insurance. Title insurance usually protects homeowners from the transgressions of past owners, but it also protects against fraud. 
• Don’t fall for phishing. If you receive a suspicious message that asks for personal details, there are a few ways to determine if it was sent by a phisher aiming to steal your identity. Before clicking on any links, hover over it with your cursor to reveal the full website. If there are typos in the URL or it redirects to anyplace other than where it advertises, do not click on it. Also, phishers often send messages with a tone of urgency, and they try to inspire extreme emotions such as excitement or fear. If an unsolicited email urges you to “act fast!” slow down and evaluate the situation. 
• Remain calm. Staying cool under pressure is easier said than done concerning matters about your home. Down-on-their-luck homeowners can be too quick to jump at too-good-to-be-true loan offers that turn out to be scams. There is often a time crunch in making mortgage payments, but take your time to review contracts and research the lender to make sure that your home and finances are in competent hands. 
• Report scams. To prevent others from enduring the same headache and uncertainty of real estate scams, you can report suspicious messages and instances of fraud and other cybercrimes to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre. 
• Sign up for an identity theft alert service. An identity theft alert service warns you about suspicious activity surrounding your personal information, allowing you to jump to action before irreparable damage is done. McAfee Total Protection not only keeps your devices safe from viruses but gives you the added peace of mind that your identity is secure, as well. 

Stay Updated 

To stay updated on all things McAfee and on top of the latest consumer and mobile security threats, follow @McAfee_Home on Twitter, subscribe to our newsletter, listen to our podcast Hackable?, and ‘Like’ us on Facebook.  

The post 3 Canadian Real Estate Scams You Should Know About appeared first on McAfee Blogs.

As Ransomware continues to spread and target organizations around the world, it is critical to leverage threat intelligence data. And not just any threat intelligence but actionable intelligence from MVISION Insights. Fortunately, there are several steps you can take to proactively increase your Endpoint Security to help minimize damage from the next Darkside, WannaCry, Ryuk, or REvil

Which Ransomware campaigns and threat profiles are most likely going to hit you?

MVISION Insights provides near real time statistics on the prevalence of Ransomware campaigns and threat profiles detections by country, by sector and in your environment.

Above you can see that although 5ss5c is the most detected ransomware worldwide, in France Darkside and Ryuk have been the most detected campaigns in the last 10 days. You can also sort top campaigns by industry sector.

How to proactively increase your level of protection against these ransomwares?

As you can see above, MVISION Insights measures your overall Endpoint Security score and provides recommendations on which McAfee Endpoint Security features should be enabled for maximum protection.

Then, MVISION Insights assesses out-of-the-box the minimum version of your McAfee Endpoint Security AMcore content necessary to protect against each campaign. As you can see above, two devices have an insufficient coverage against the “CISA-FBI Cybersecurity Advisory on the Darkside Ransomware”. You can then use McAfee ePO to update these two devices.

Below, MVISION Insights provides a link to a KB article for the “Darkside Ransomware profile” with detailed suggestions on which McAfee Endpoint Security rules to enable in your McAfee ePO policies. First, the minimum set of rules to better protect against this ransomware campaign. Second, the aggressive set to fully block the campaign. The second one can create false positives and should only be used in major crisis situations.

How to proactively check if you have been breached?

MVISION Insights can show you whether you have unresolved detections for specific campaigns. Below you can see that you have an unresolved detection linked the “Operation Iron Ore” threat campaign.

MVISION Insights provides IOCs (Indicators of comprises) which your SOC can use with MVISION EDR to look for the presence of these malicious indicators.

If your SOC has experienced threat hunters MVISION Insights also provides information on the MITRE Tactics, Techniques and Tools linked to this threat campaign or threat profile. This data is also available via the MVISION APIs to integrate with your other SOC tools. In fact, several integrations are already available today with other vendors from the McAfee SIA partnership.

Finally, the ultimate benefit from MVISION Insights is that you can use it to show to your management whether your organization is correctly protected against the latest ransomware attacks.

In summary, you can easily leverage MVISION Insights to proactively increase your protection against ransomware by:

• • Identifying which ransomware are most likely going to hit you
  • Adapting your McAfee Endpoint Security protection against these campaigns using McAfee’s recommendations
  • Proactively checking whether you might be breached
  • Showing your protection status against these threats to your management

 

 

 

The post How to Proactively Increase Your Protection Against Ransomware with Threat Intelligence appeared first on McAfee Blogs.

After 500 million LinkedIn enthusiasts were affected in a data-scraping incident in April, it’s happened again – with big security ramifications.

A survey from GSMA and Trend Micro shows a concerning lack of security capabilities for private 5G networks (think factories, smart cities, industrial IoT, utilities and more).

A vulnerability in NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience software opens the door to remote data access, manipulation and deletion.

American IT companies and government have been targeted by the Nobelium state-sponsored group.  

The driver, called “Netfilter,” is a rootkit that talks to Chinese C2 IPs and aims to spoof gamers’ geo-locations to cheat the system and play from anywhere, Microsoft said.

Saryu Nayyar, CEO at Gurucul, goes over what defenses CISOs need now, and how and why to prioritize the options.

It’s a series of vulnerabilities:

Josep Rodriguez, a researcher and consultant at security firm IOActive, has spent the last year digging up and reporting vulnerabilities in the so-called near-field communications reader chips used in millions of ATMs and point-of-sale systems worldwide. NFC systems are what let you wave a credit card over a reader — rather than swipe or insert it — to make a payment or extract money from a cash machine. You can find them on countless retail store and restaurant counters, vending machines, taxis, and parking meters around the globe.

Now Rodriguez has built an Android app that allows his smartphone to mimic those credit card radio communications and exploit flaws in the NFC systems’ firmware. With a wave of his phone, he can exploit a variety of bugs to crash point-of-sale devices, hack them to collect and transmit credit card data, invisibly change the value of transactions, and even lock the devices while displaying a ransomware message. Rodriguez says he can even force at least one brand of ATMs to dispense cash­though that “jackpotting” hack only works in combination with additional bugs he says he’s found in the ATMs’ software. He declined to specify or disclose those flaws publicly due to nondisclosure agreements with the ATM vendors.

Every day you place your personal information in the hands of companies and trust that it will remain safe. However, what happens when external threats jeopardize your personal data security, especially while working remotely? 

The transition to remote work environments and consumers’ online habits have made it more difficult for Canadian employees and consumers to protect their personal information. This challenge is primarily due to ransomware. To protect yourself, you need to first understand how cybercriminals take advantage of users’ online behaviors to launch strategic attacks against employees and consumers through the information they glean from stolen company data. 

How Your Personal Actions Can Impact Corporate Systems 

Ransomware has been on the rise this past year with attacks increasing 62% in 2020 according to Statista. In fact, 78% of Canadian cybersecurity professionals said that attacks increased due to employees working remotely in a recent VMware report. Cybercriminals target remote workers primarily through malicious links sent through phishing emails — in fact, over one third of Canadian respondents in a recent survey said they experienced at least one phishing attempt in the last year.   

Hackers pose as legitimate organizations and prompt individuals to take action: say you decide to check your personal email on your work laptop during your lunch break. You open a message that claims to be from one of your favorite retailers claiming that you just won $500 in shopping credit – all you need to do is click on the link and fill out your banking information. This is an example of a phishing attack that could not only wreak havoc on your personal security, but your company’s as well. If the link in the message downloads a credential-stealing malware on your work laptop, there is a good chance that your organization’s private data or network could be compromised.  

Knowing that many employees will be communicating virtually instead of face-to-face, hackers can take advantage of the remote work environment by posing as employees from finance departments and sending fake invoices for products or services. The goal of these fake invoices is for employees to call a support phone number to investigate, whereby hackers attain credit card numbers or other information they can leverage in spear-phishing scams. Hackers can also spoof phone calls to make it look like it is coming from a legitimate number within the organization. Revealing too much information to an unverified contact is a risk that remote workers must learn to identify and avoid. 

Ransomware is always evolving, making it critical to understand the nature of these threats so you can better avoid them.  

The 5 Most Dangerous Ransomware Scams  

Cybercriminals are constantly finding new ways to automate their attacks and increase their profits. Here is a look at five active ransomware variants cybercriminals use today—and how they deploy them. 

1. CryptoDefense 

By the end of 2020, McAfee Labs observed a 69% increase in new ransomware, which Cryptodefense largely drove. This virus is similar to CryptoLocker, a trojan virus that spreads through email phishing to infiltrate hard drives and files. Both spread ransomware, use high levels of encryption to compromise users’ files, and claim that these files cannot be decrypted without a decryption key.  

2. Maze 

Maze ransomware has been active since November of 2019 and is operated by hackers notorious for leaking victim data upon non-payment. Maze operators first gain access to a network by using valid credentials. It will then scan the network for user devices, check these devices for additional credentials, and compromise user files.  

3. REvil/Sodinokibi 

In a Ransomware Task Force interview with an affiliate of the REvil/Sodinokibi syndicate, the interviewee revealed that companies with cyber insurance are prime targets since the chances of a payout are high. This ransomware spreads through software vulnerabilities, phishing scams, and exploit kits. Once it infiltrates a device, it spreads through escalated privilege to compromise user files and systems.  

4. Ryuk 

Ryuk has been around since August of 2018 and targets large companies, critical infrastructure, and hospitals. This ransomware is almost always spread through a banking trojan called Trickbot, used by hackers to steal financial and banking credentials. The operators behind this ransomware demand higher ransoms compared to other groups. They also use opensource tools and manual hacking techniques to bypass detection and infiltrate private networks. 

5. SamSam 

The operators behind SamSam ransomware gain access through Windows servers using a Microsoft protocol that allows remote connections to other computers. Operators will then elevate their privilege to include admin rights once inside a network to infect servers with malware, requiring no action or authorization on the victim’s part. 

How to Reduce the Risk and Impact of Ransomware 

Ransomware can affect anyone, regardless of whether you are an employee or a customer of a targeted company. Keep these tips in mind to reduce your risk of a ransomware attack and know what steps to take if you fall victim.   

1. Don’t click on malicious links 

Phishing emails are one of the most common methods a hacker will use to infect devices and spread ransomware. They will send links through seemingly legitimate emails to trick users into clicking on them and downloading malicious files. Knowing how to spot one is the first step to prevent infection. If you receive an email you suspect is a phishing scam, start by analyzing its structure: common indicators of a phishing scam may include: 

• Grammatical errors with poorly written wording 

• Pressure to take immediate action or confirm personal information 
• Link addresses that do not match the anchor text in the email body 
• Inconsistent sender name and email address 
• Suspicious attachments  

Once you identify a phishing email, don’t click on any links or download attachments. Simply delete it and carry on with your day.  

2. Use multi-factor authentication and strong passwords 

Keep in mind that the cybercriminals behind Maze ransomware gained access to private networks through valid credentials. Hackers typically obtain these credentials through a “password spray” technique where they attempt to log in to accounts using a list of commonly used passwords. However, hackers have a higher chance of guessing valid passwords if they are too short or not complex enough. Additionally, a hacker is more likely to infiltrate multiple accounts if they share the same password. 

Strong passwords help ensure that a hacker cannot access your private network, gain administrative rights to your device, or infect another device you are connected to. Create a password that is strong enough to withstand simple guess-and-check attempts by making them long, difficult, and unique. Multi-phrased passwords or passphrases also help to prevent hackers from breaking into your accounts, such as “P3anutbutter&J3lly.” Avoid reusing passwords across multiple accounts and change them periodically, especially after an account has been breached. Even if a hacker does steal your credentials, multi-factor authentication adds an extra validation layer to prohibit unauthorized sign-in attempts.  

3. Use security software to monitor threats 

Your device is more susceptible to ransomware and viruses without the right security tools to help mitigate the chances of infection. Avoid the risk of a ransomware attack by employing a quality security solution like McAfee Total Protection. A holistic security solution can help you stay vigilant of cyber threats by monitoring for ransomware viruses in addition to malware and spyware. Security software can also monitor your internet connection and network traffic through regular scans to flag malicious activity and provide guidance on how to sidestep these threats. If a hacker attempts to launch an attack on your device, you can rest assured your security software will promptly alert you of the intrusion. 

 4. Regularly update devices 

In addition to social engineering tactics, hackers will leverage vulnerabilities in software to create a back door through which they can infiltrate user devices. A way to keep cyber criminals out is to keep your software applications and devices up to date. This includes the apps on your mobile device as well as apps on your desktop. Regular updates ensure that the proper security patches are implemented, the right bugs are fixed and that hackers cannot exploit these vulnerabilities. 

5. Remediate and restore files and systems 

If worse comes to worst and your device is infected with ransomware, the first thing to do is isolate the device and disconnect from shared networks. Disconnecting the infected device ensures that ransomware cannot spread to other devices on that same network.  

Immediately gather evidence on what type of malware you are dealing with so you can accurately report it to authorities and determine what your options are for remediation. You can then choose to remove it or wipe your system completely which is the most assured way to eliminate ransomware from your device. Afterwards you can reinstall your operating system and, provided you perform regular backups, restore your files to a previous version.  

Defeat Ransomware Threats    

No one is truly out of the danger zone when hackers strike. Ransomware is on the rise, and online users must understand how to bypass these viruses to avoid the ramifications of a compromised device. By understanding online security best practices, users can safeguard their online presence and defend against ransomware threats.  

Stay Updated 

To stay updated on all things McAfee and on top of the latest consumer and mobile security threats, follow @McAfee_Home on Twitter, subscribe to our newsletter, listen to our podcast Hackable?, and ‘Like’ us on Facebook.  

The post 5 Ransomware Threats Canadians Need to Know appeared first on McAfee Blogs.