Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but “immitation”—or “imittation,” or “imitatioon”—may be the sincerest sign of a typosquatting cyberfraudster.

Cybersecurity firm Cado Security recently spotted a suspicious domain that looked identical to its usual site, minus an only slightly misspelled URL.

What concerned Cado solutions engineer Paul Scott more than a typosquatting attack—a longtime tactic used by threat actors to trick users into visiting malicious replicas of a known destination—was the scale of the operation and the number of companies seemingly targeted by one campaign.

“It’s either one person doing this constantly, all the time—or more likely, a small group of people doing this as their way of generating income,” Scott told IT Brew.

Mission imposter-ble. During a recent routine check, the Cado team spotted a site that “bore a striking resemblance,” according to an August 21 blog post, to the cybersecurity company’s corporate domain.

Read the rest here.—BH

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More like dental damage.

Your dentist’s office isn’t the first place you might think of as a cybersecurity risk, but as Medix Dental CEO Tom Terronez told IT Brew recently, the amount of private information stored there makes it a potential threat.

“One of the things that makes dental more vulnerable is that it’s still majority on-premise, local practice management software,” Terronez said, adding that that means “they’re way behind a lot of other industries that are in cloud uptake.”

Gummed up. The FBI warned the American Dental Association in May of the potential danger to providers from hackers. In May 2023, hackers attacked Delta Dental of California in a breach exposing the information of around 7 million patients.

In April 2023, Aspen Dental—a chain with more than 1,000 dentists’ offices across the country—suffered a ransomware hack that exposed user data, including health insurance information and Social Security numbers.

Read more here.—EH

The global CrowdStrike IT outage in July caused widespread chaos and financial damage to businesses large and small. Thousands of flights were canceled or delayed, an Alaskan 911 system was temporarily unavailable, broadcasters went dark, and for HR pros, the outage left many employees with the infamous “blue screen of death” and even upended payroll systems for some companies.

The meltdown served as a painful reminder of the vulnerability of technology that organizations rely on for basic functions. But cyber experts also see the high-profile outage as an opportunity for HR to deepen employees’ relationship with colleagues in the IT department, and reinforce employee best practices.

CompTIA’s chief technology evangelist, James Stanger, acknowledged that the CrowdStrike outage “was not something that individual users could do a whole lot about.” But he told HR Brew that the incident reinforces the importance of protecting any work-related technology—and educating employees about proper tech hygiene.

And while many organizations do have good tech hygiene policies, in some cases it’s dated—or as Stanger said, it’s “good hygiene for 10 years ago.”

Keep reading at HR Brew.—AD

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