His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) recently announced that it has been hit by a sophisticated phishing scam, which resulted in the theft of approximately £47 million ($63.76 million) from over 100,000 taxpayer accounts. The attack took place in... Read More
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Introducing Specops Service Desk for Cloud (Entra ID)
The service desk has become a prime target for sophisticated social‐engineering campaigns. It’s never been more important to arm frontline support teams with the tools they need to verify every caller from a potential liability into a confirmed identity.... Read More
[New research] FTP ports under attack: Which passwords are hackers using?
The Specops research team has analyzed passwords being used to attack FTP ports over the past 30 days, in live attacks happening against real networks. Our team have found the most common passwords being used in brute force attacks,... Read More
DragonForce: Inside the Ransomware-as-a-Service group
The popularity of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has exploded over the past decade. The benefits for organizations are obvious – SaaS is scalable, cost-effective, and doesn’t need complex installation or maintenance. Gartner expects global spending on SaaS to reach $3 billion... Read More
Scattered Spider service desk attacks: How to defend your organization
Scattered Spider is a disparate hacking collective that has surged to prominence by using sophisticated social engineering tactics. One of their key tactics is exploiting people – specifically, corporate service desks. They’ve recently hit the headlines by allegedly duping... Read More
M&S ransomware hack: Active Directory & Service Desk security lessons
M&S (Marks and Spencers) are a cornerstone of British retail with over 64,000 employees – so it was a shock for many to see them laid low by a ransomware attack in April 2025. The retail giant fell victim... Read More
Could the Spain and Portugal blackout have been a cyber-attack?
‘Cyber-attack’ was the phrase on many people’s minds when large parts of Spain and Portugal were recently plunged into a blackout. Authorities are investigating the root cause, with early reports suggesting a technical malfunction caused by a ‘rare atmospheric... Read More
AI vishing: Mastering the art of voice deception
Picture an Italian entrepreneur receiving a phone call from their country’s Defense Minister, Guido Crosetto. The politician has an important but challenging ask – he needs the wealthy individual to wire around €1 million to a Hong Kong-based bank... Read More
Post-quantum cryptography: Password security in the quantum era
Quantum mechanics is the study of physics at the level of incredibly small things – smaller than atoms. Anyone who’s looked into theories like wave-particle duality and entanglement, knows things can get confusing (and weird) very quickly. But it’s... Read More
ALIEN TXTBASE data-dump analysis: Dangerous or junk?
Specops researchers have been digging into the ALIEN TXTBASE data-dump, which was recently merged into the HaveIBeenPwned (HIBP) dataset by Troy Hunt. After some analysis of the over 200 million passwords in this dataset, we estimate about 20 million... Read More