2017 Cisco WebEx Flaw Increasingly Leveraged by Attackers, Phishing Campaigns Rise

Network attacks targeting a vulnerability in the Cisco Webex Chrome extension have increased dramatically. In fact, they were the second-most common network attack, according to WatchGuard Technologies latest Internet Security Report for the last quarter of 2018.

The vulnerability was first disclosed and patched in 2017 and attacks were almost non-existent in early 2018, but WatchGuard detections grew by over 7,000 percent from Q3 to Q4.

The report also shows that phishing campaigns saw a dangerous increase in sophistication, with new attacks using advanced methods including threatening to release recordings of users visiting adult content online, customising emails for specific targets and creating fake banking login web pages.

Based on data from tens of thousands of active WatchGuard Firebox appliances around the world, a new sextortion phishing attack was the second-most common attack detected in Q4 2018. It accounted for almost half of the unique malware hashes detected, because the email phishing message is tailored to each recipient.

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