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IT Brew

Tom McKay

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Graphic of gravestones in descending height order

Scam obituary sites draw enterprise traffic, research finds

Obituary sites that currently scam users into installing push notifications and pop-ups could be a vehicle for malware.

Amanda Florian

Threat actors in China becoming ‘more brazen,’ NSA says 

Dave Luber of the NSA told IT Brew new incidents tied to Volt Typhoon are unfolding every day based on “industry and incident response reporting.”

Billy Hurley

HSB adds cyber protections to automotive coverage

The insurance provider sees the car a lot like a computer—both can be hacked.

A shield with a checkmark inside icon denoting cybersecurity

Cybersecurity

On July 4, just five hours after Joey Chestnut 

, President Trump signed legislation taking a big bite out of Medicaid.

To pay for Big Beautiful’s tax cuts, the bill reduces federal Medicaid spending by approximately $1 trillion from 2025 to 2034, according to estimates from nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF). The bill limits state-provider tax arrangements (cutting $191 billion, according to the KFF analysis) and state-directed Medicaid payments (cutting 

A June 24 examination from the Congressional Budget Office calculated that the bill’s Medicaid provisions would lead to 7.8 million uninsured individuals by 2034, and lower funds would result in states “reducing provider payment rates, reducing the scope or amount of optional services, and reducing Medicaid enrollment.”

With less money, Michael Hamilton, field CISO of Lumifi Cyber, sees rural hospitals (which rely heavily on Medicaid for revenue) sacrificing in an area they can ill afford to cut: cybersecurity.

“They’re not going to be investing in, ‘Hey, let’s get better at patching.’ They’re just going to try and keep their IT networks alive,” Hamilton told us.

“We are going to start seeing some ransomware or other kinds of extortion events that ultimately end up putting these hospitals out of business or forcing them into a fire sale.”

Tim Powers faced ransomware when he was an executive at a Nevada hospital in 2021; the incident led to downed systems and encrypted files (and a monthlong move to pen and paper, Powers told us).

Now as CFO at nonprofit Idaho Hospitals Association, Powers acts as a “Medicaid guru,” assisting orgs with financial issues and helping facilities as new legislation impacts resources.

While Powers hopes orgs don’t compromise on cybersecurity services, it wouldn’t surprise him to see cyber cuts.

“It’s all about patient care, and ‘Where can I put my best resources and efforts to take care of the patients in my community?’” Powers said. When hospitals consider costs associated with implementing a cybersecurity initiative, “they might think twice about it.”

, examined over 250 US rural hospitals and determined many struggle with basic cybersecurity practices like email security (65% of respondents admitted), multifactor authentication (69%), and network segmentation (62%).

In 2024, Microsoft launched its Cybersecurity Program for Rural Hospitals—a project offering US facilities free security assessments, training resources, and security-product discounts. More than 375 of the roughly 2,000 US rural hospitals are participating in Microsoft-funded cybersecurity assessments, the white paper revealed.

A Georgetown University study released in January found that in 15 states, at least 20% of working-age adults living in small towns and rural areas are covered by Medicaid.

“Large reductions in federal Medicaid funding would put the residents of small towns and rural communities and their healthcare systems at serious risk,” the report concluded.

Almost half (48%) of rural hospitals operated at a loss in 2023, according to the 

 (AHA). Total hospital expenses grew 5.1% in 2024, 

 revealed: labor spend accounted for 56% of hospital costs, drugs took up 9%, and “supplies” reached 13%.

In 2026, according to the July 4 bill, $50 billion over the next five years will be available through a Rural Health Transformation Program, following application proposals from states.

“We will be competing for those dollars with other entities. So, we have to put our best foot forward to make certain our members have front-and-center access to that cash available to them and cyber is a big piece of that,” Powers told us.

Illustration of a hospital with a "sorry we're closed" sign in front of it

Hospital pros reflect on Medicaid cuts and the cyber impacts on rural healthcare

At least one security pro sees more ransomware and “fire sales.”

Caroline Nihill

The Department of Education was subject to a phishing campaign that targeted the agency’s G5 portal, which handles its grant management system.

BforeAI, a company that provides predictive intelligence for attacks and digital risk protections, identified the campaign on July 15 according to 

 released by the company. The cybersecurity group found that there were “multiple lookalike domains” that were attempting to spoof the G5 login page to harvest login credentials.

Lead researcher at BforeAI Abu Qureshi told IT Brew that the company was tracking the bad actor that had been targeting insurance and HR agencies in the US, but pivoted to ED as the group started doing work to take the campaign down. Qureshi said that the phishing attempt is “very timely” with the recent layoffs from the agency.

“It’s not uncommon for actors to try and exploit these reductions in force in big companies or layoffs in [the] public sector as well, especially because the view from the attacker perspective is that public sector is not very well staffed internally to begin with for cybersecurity,” Qureshi said.

Qureshi said that currently, the victim tally is unknown and is not something they are tracking, but “the infrastructure is still live and it was live for some time…there’s a chance that there have been victims.”

These could be the same actors that BforeAI found were sending fraudulent texts to users accused of having unpaid toll fees, according to Qureshi. These actors were found to “be almost operated exclusively out of China.”

“We haven’t been able to connect the dots yet, but it’s possible,” Qureshi said. “The amount of time this has been live leads me to believe that it likely is one of those geographies that don’t cooperate with the US or even companies based in the West.”

He continued: “This is a common problem we face on the…internet mitigation, abuse mitigation side, which is dealing with unfriendly nations and dealing with operators within those unfriendly nations. Because sometimes it has to get to the level where the US government gets involved and outreach to that government—and then they kick in the door, quite literally at some point, because they will not take this down.”

The department did not respond to BforeAI’s report that the company sent through its Office of Inspector General, according to Qureshi.

ED now has a message populated on the G5 portal stating the phishing campaign “intended to steal login credentials to access grant award data and change payment instructions.” The agency advised users to type in G5’s URL directly instead of clicking links from any email.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Phishing hook going through a mouse pointer arrow

Education Department targeted in phishing scheme

 BforeAI, a cybersecurity threat intelligence company, found evidence of a phishing scheme involving ED’s grant management system on July 15. 

If you don’t feel like reading this whole thing: Somebody snuck malicious info into an AI-assisted email summary.

A researcher submitting to GenAI bug-bounty platform 0din demonstrated how to hide a command in an email; the instructions presented a false “security alert” in a message’s AI-generated synopsis.

” reveals an inherent weakness in GenAI that is tough to defend, cybersecurity pros told IT Brew.

Kev Breen, senior director of cyber threat research at Immersive, said a GenAI prompt is always the last part of the transaction, and a clever (or even simple) prompt telling a large language model to ignore its built-in instructions can upend the technology.

“There’s always a way around it. It’s just because of the way generative AI works,” Breen said.

 showed how the right prompt could trick a large language model—not just Gemini—into extracting sensitive data and creating malicious code.

0din revealed details of the social-engineering tactic in a 

An attacker crafts a command that Gemini must include the message and its phony tech-support contact number in its summary response.

The command code, hidden in zero-size, white font against a white background, is classified as “admin,” which Gemini treats as high priority, according to the post.

After a recipient clicks “summarize this email,” Gemini reads the HTML and follows the invisible directive, attaching the false warning to the summary.

In an emailed statement shared with IT Brew, Google Workspace spokesperson Ross Richendrfer wrote that defending against prompt injections are a “continued priority” for the company. “We are constantly hardening our already robust defenses through red-teaming exercises that train our models to defend against these types of adversarial attacks,” his email read.

 against prompt-injection attacks, which included “targeted security instructions surrounding the prompt content to remind the large language model (LLM) to perform the user-directed task and ignore any adversarial instructions that could be present in the content.”

The tactic revealed by 0din, however, uses the summary feature. A targeted user potentially would be the one following the directions of the phishing message and contacting a phony tech-support pro looking for credentials or money.

Even if a company found identifiers for a specific prompt injection, too, the ways to include malicious instructions are “infinite,” Gartner VP Analyst Dennis Xu said. In the case of the 0din demo, what if you just place a 

 command in an email that’s 20 pages long? What if you make the font just gray instead of white?

“The language model…it’s like a five-year-old kid. You can easily manipulate it to do anything you want,” he told us.

Nonprofit software security group OWASP considers prompt injection a 

 for LLMs and GenAI. (Xu and Richendrfer said they had not yet seen active attacks using tactics like those revealed in the 0din post.)

Breen showed screenshots of the tactic still working on July 15. In his trial, however, the AI’s output began with, “This email includes a hidden warning in the signature.”

Immersive recently led a challenge to see if humans could trick an LLM into revealing a secret word. (Spoiler: many did.) One participant, according to Breen, got the password by asking the LLM to present an output in emojis.

“You can engineer tighter system prompts to try and force it to only behave the way you want it to behave. One of the things we learned in our challenge…is that human ingenuity always wins out.”

The Google Gemini logo, a star within a circle, hovering above a bear trap.

In summary: Researcher demos prompt-injection attack on Gemini

A bug-finder hid malicious instructions in email to mess with Google’s email-summary feature.

The hospitality industry is facing polished, personalized impersonations from cyberattackers looking for credentials and data. With AI powering sophisticated phishing and deepfakes, malicious hackers are zeroing in on hotels and booking platforms, according to pros in the field who spoke with IT Brew.

“In an industry that’s built on customer trust, the attackers are targeting the very channels that people rely on: all of the confirmation emails, SMS updates that they get, and mobile apps to deliver all of this malicious content that we’re seeing,” Pam Lindemoen, chief security officer and VP of strategy

at the cyberintelligence-sharing group Retail and Hospitality Information Security and Analysis Center (RH-ISAC), said.

 RH-ISAC shared three examples with IT Brew of recent phishing messages.

With convincing vacation images and a “Give feedback” button, one notification asks guests to rate their recent stay.

Another email, featuring familiar, palm-tree graphic design, says, “Your booking is now confirmed” complete with a booking reference and a “Manage my booking” option.

A third example revealed a replica “Rewards” page.

The phishing attack is not necessarily entirely new, according to Lindemoen; what’s novel, she wrote in a follow-up email, is the increased sophistication with which threat actors are executing these scams. GenAI tools create realistic graphics and copy in a matter of minutes, she noted.

Lindemoen said fraudsters use malicious links and PDFs to infect devices with info-stealing malware, or to send travelers to false travel sites to pull their personal information.

Adversary groups like DarkHotel, as far back as 2014, have specifically targeted 

, with false software updates on hotel wi-fi networks.

“The hospitality business: They’re kind humans. They want to please you,” Lindemoen said. “They’re preying on the actual thing that makes them trustworthy.”

According to a recently published hospitality report from cybersecurity company VikingCloud, 48% of hotel IT and cybersecurity leaders admit they lack confidence in their staff’s ability to detect or respond to AI-driven threats like deepfakes.

Deloitte’s Center for Financial Services predicts that GenAI could lead to $40 billion in fraud losses in the US by 2027.

The stakes are high, according to VikingCloud CPO Kevin Pierce, with 212 million US adults set to travel this summer. The combination of high-value customer data, seasonal surges, and overstretched IT resources creates a “perfect storm,” Pierce wrote to us, adding that cybercriminals can exploit the seasonal pressure and leverage AI-powered tools to launch large-scale attacks.

VikingCloud’s survey of 50 hotel IT and cybersecurity practitioners in North America found that 26% of respondents admitted to “limited” in-house cybersecurity expertise.

Lindemoen recommends brand-monitoring technologies, tools that use tactics like machine learning and heuristics to catch spoofed domains.

“It’s really difficult to see, it’s really difficult to fight,” she said. “It’s just exploiting brand loyalty, and it’s basically attacking the trust that you’ve built with your customers.”

Animation of lock icon inserting into a hotel keycard machine.

We’ve been expecting you: Cyberattackers target travelers

GenAI has made life easier for hospitality phishers.

Eoin Higgins

As concerns grow about how the technology is being applied across industries and how it could be exploited, recent research from both Netcraft and SquareX has revealed the extent to which some LLMs and agents are vulnerable to attack—and it’s worse than you might think.

Audrey Adeline, a member of the SquareX Founder’s Office, told IT Brew that AI isn’t capable of making snap decisions. Because the technology is trained to complete tasks, it will continue to do those tasks without any knowledge of security risks. That’s a different way of processing information than human intelligence.

“We have these browser AI agents that are acting on the behalf of users, and at least for employees, even though they’re the ‘weakest link,’ they do receive some sort of security training,” Adeline said.

SquareX found that when AI agents—used by 79% of organizations, a PwC 

 found—are given permissions like they’re human beings, the potential for exploitation grows. As software robots, they’re not capable of judging each situation on its own merits, meaning that errors can go uncorrected until they’re addressed by human oversight. The problem is, primarily, that an agent may reveal information or expose data without relaying that to their controllers, leaving a gap in understanding that could lead to a security flaw.

“The key problem here is the agent is having the same privilege level as a user,” Adeline said. “For example, if I told an AI agent to do something, they literally have access to every single enterprise app, every single password that I as a user have access to.”

The problem isn’t isolated to AI agents. About one-third of the time, 

, LLMs are responding to queries for sign-in URLs with fake or compromised sites rather than the correct logins. By the numbers, that works out to 6 LLMs returning the correct site 66% of the time, but 29% “were unregistered, parked, or had no active content.” A further 5% belonged to unrelated brands. That’s potentially creating problems for companies as attackers look to take advantage of the opportunity, research author Bilaal Rashid told IT Brew.

“The big multinational brands, the LLMs are a lot more reliable—our belief is that they included a lot more of the training data, so the LLMs were less likely to hallucinate the login sites and the domains that were owned by those brands,” Rashid said. “But for those smaller ones, those kind of more national ones which are still big in their own right, that’s really where the LLMs are starting to jump and fall.”

For IT teams, the best move is to focus on raising awareness of the danger, according to Rashid, who noted that any real solution to the problem will have to prioritize guardrails and mitigation for sanitizing LLM outputs. Mitigation of the possibility of malicious phishing at the URL level is a good starting point—but the onus is also on affected companies to clean up their own house.

“There’s a responsibility from the brands as well to try and make sure that they are pushing their content and that their benign content is there,” Rashid said, adding that companies also need to combat phishing sites as they pop up.

When it comes to managing the agentic security threat, Adeline recommended that in the immediate term, browser-native detection capability can stop the agent from malicious activity. Creating sub-identities for agents can restrict their permissions and actions. And in the long term, technology will hopefully be able to differentiate between human users and agents in real time.

“Now this is quite a technological challenge, so it might take a while, but we’re hoping that research like ours will incentivize them to do something, because I think this is really the future of internet browsing,” Adeline said.

human hand touching robot's through a looking glass type image

AI increasingly a weak link in security, research finds

“The key problem here is the agent is having the same privilege level as a user,” SquareX exec says. 

Finding love online is not a shocking thing anymore—assuming you’re making a meaningful connection with, you know, a person and not a scammer. Or, worse, an organized group of scammers who are looking to build trust with an individual to get as much money as possible. One particularly heinous investment scam involving cryptocurrency also comes with its own not-so romantic nickname: “

A study from the University of Texas at Austin has estimated that these kinds of bad actors have collected 

 from victims worldwide between January 2020 and February 2024. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, meanwhile, found that cryptocurrency scams 

Jorij Abraham, managing director at the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA), said that he often tries to steer away from the phrase because, “We’re really talking about victims who are really hurt in two terrible ways.”

Abraham continued: “They lose money, but they really lose the trust in people because they have built up a relationship with a person, sometimes over years, they love or they trust, who they see as their best friend, and then it proves that their best friend is not their friend at all, but somebody who really knows to get…everything.”

In the worst incidents, some victims have even died by suicide. In June 2024, 

 a man taking his life after being victimized by a pig-butchering scheme, and noted that he’s not the only one.

The bad actors, after building some kind of relationship with a victim, will often offer advice on investing in cryptocurrency and testify that they used the same means to afford a wealthy lifestyle.

Victims, after investing on what looks like a credible platform, will try to take out money from their investment only to learn that there are more barriers to their money, like an online validation fee or a global tax, according to founder and president of Operation Shamrock (an advocacy group that aims to educate, mobilize, and disrupt cyber scams) Erin West.

“It’s a very genius operation, because the victim is led to believe they’re helping themselves,” West said. “Another narrative that you frequently see in the media is the people gave this money away or they’ll say, ‘Don’t send money to someone you don’t know.’ That’s not what’s happening here at all, they think that they are investing their money for their own benefit.”

Abraham agreed with the scam’s sophistication, but noted seeing some victims being able to take out some money, “They get enthusiastic, and they really believe.”

The scammer continues to push the victim, sometimes telling them that they have to invest imminently before a market boom, to try and lure them to invest everything they have in the scheme.

Once the scam is revealed, victims can be contacted by someone posing as law enforcement. Instead, it’s the scammers reaching out again to ask the victim to pay fake fees, according to Abraham.

“They’re scamming the same person over and over again until they know for sure that there’s no more money to be gotten,” Abraham said.

 Carole House, a board member of Operation Shamrock and a former National Security Council official, told IT Brew the scheme goes after vulnerable individuals, specifically trying to build trust through a relationship, where that be platonic or romantic.

“It’s not always romantically bound, but it’s a really common mechanism for how that trust development really goes over time,” House said.

 as an urgent health threat, which West said is a variable of the pig-butchering crisis happening globally.

“I think there’s a narrative that plays in the media of, these are old people, these are old people, these are vulnerable people. But the fact is, there are people who are interested in having a relationship,” he said.

Scammers, according to West, “will build a relationship with you that is unlike anything you’ve ever had in your life before, because this person will target in on the things that make you you, and the things that you need. They will fill those gaps and people will say, ‘I lost a lot of money, but honestly, that was the best relationship I ever had.’”

Macro crop of a heart-shaped lock with a split crack in the middle, forming the shape of a dollar sign.

Pig butchering: How scammers are enticing victims to give them their savings

Often a cryptocurrency investment fraud or romance scheme, experts say pig butchering is a cybercrime that needs attention.

Nation state actors are a threat to the industrial sector—but at least they play by the rules.

Those rules aren’t hard and fast, but in general, nation state leaders tend to discourage direct involvement in causing chaos and instead prioritize 

 like supporting criminal groups operating in the country. That’s in contrast to cybercriminals and hacktivists; while the danger presented by nation states shouldn’t be underestimated, it’s important to understand the difference in tactics.

“These guys don’t play by the same rules; they’re motivated by different things, they want to be noticed for different reasons,” Dragos SVP of Intelligence and Services Kurt Gaudette told IT Brew. “And that changes things in a big way.”

Fighting back requires a diversity of tactics. But first you need to understand the scope of the threat.

Attackers acting on the world stage without the tempering influence of nation states present a unique threat, as 

 last year. Often, these threat actors are motivated by ideology, which isn’t as easy as criminal activity for state actors to manage. And the aging digital infrastructure in the industrial space makes for a 

When it comes to attacks from nation states, there are avenues for dealing with the problem, Gaudette said. Those can include political or diplomatic pressure, sanctions, and other soft power weapons. But criminal groups operate in a more “Wild West” environment, making addressing the threats more complicated.

Adding further complication is how some nation states allow groups like this to operate. It’s sometimes turning a blind eye, or, in some cases, outright endorsing the behavior, said Kerri Shafer-Page, VP of digital forensics incident response at Arctic Wolf.

“We see both of them acting independently, but I do think there’s a level of collaboration that potentially is happening,” Shafer-Page said. “The hacktivists are out in the media, taking the responsibility for whatever they’ve done, and it still accomplishes what the nation state actor hoped would happen.”

One challenge for companies dealing with these types of attacks is how they invest in preventing the threat in the first place. Some organizations and firms have difficulty with proactive investment due to the intricacies of running a business and deciding what to put money into.

“You get those companies that maybe are ignorant and or just immature—they want to do the right thing, but they don’t know how to do it,” Gaudette said. “And then you got companies that I think manage their risk differently and are just going, ‘Does it affect our bottom line?’”

One thing that’s essential, Shafer-Page said, is having an incident response plan. That will allow for clear communication with insurance and other interested parties as you get back on your feet. That includes law enforcement, who, at the federal level, will be keenly aware of the threat actor in question.

“If it’s a newer threat actor on the scene, you can leverage the information that a federal government agency might already have as it relates to that threat actor to figure out, is there something, from a defense standpoint, that a customer can do more quickly so there’s real benefit to them?” Shafer-Page said.

That works in favor of the next victim as well; more information is key to pushing back against attackers. Luckily there’s a lot of information out there to consult. Threat actors of all kinds—not just hacktivists and criminals—rely on poor security hygiene and ignorance. Knowing those weaknesses can help organizations defend themselves.

“You can invest in your people, process, and tools, it’s really the trifecta of improving your security posture,” Shafer-Page said, adding, “even if you have a very small budget, making sure that you invest wisely, and again, you’re constantly checking it almost like you change the batteries in your smoke detector.”

A view of Earth from space with red warning triangles floating around it.

Industrial sector needs diversity of tactics to battle non-state threat actors

Hacktivists and cybercriminals “don’t play by the same rules; they’re motivated by different things, they want to be noticed for different reasons,” Dragos SVP of Intelligence and Services Kurt Gaudette says.