Graham Cluley

Twitter suspended 800 million accounts last year — so why does manipulation remain so rampant? X, Elon Musk's social media site that many people (me included) still prefer to call Twitter, has told British MPs that it suspended 800 million accounts in 2024 for breaching its rules on platfo...

Elon Musk's social media site says it suspended 800 million accounts in a year for spam and manipulation - but with state-backed campaigns still flooding the platform, the question is how many fake accounts remain.

Read more in my article on Bitdefender's blog: www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/h...

New Footage Shows Wanted Kinahan Cartel Kingpins Post-Sanctions - bellingcat Daniel and Christy Kinahan have been photographed in Dubai, marking the most recent sighting of the wanted crime bosses since the US levied sanctions against the cartel.

Two of the world's most wanted men, Daniel and Christy Kinahan, were photographed at an MMA event, Bellingcat and @thetimes.com found — their most recent sighting since the US issued multi-million dollar bounties. www.bellingcat.com/news/2026/03...

How hackers bypassed MFA with a $120 phishing kit - until a global takedown shut it down In a co-ordinated public-private operation between law enforcement agencies and cybersecurity industry partners one of the world's most prolific phishing-as-a-service platforms has been dismantle...

How hackers bypassed MFA with a $120 phishing kit - until a global takedown shut it down.

Read more in my article on the Bitdefender blog: www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/h...

Great to have the Kill List's Carl Miller on "Smashing Security" this week!

Tale? Tail! Sorry. So sorry. 💆

My Humbug text adventure game actually first emerged into the world at the tale end of 1990.

See here: grahamcluley.com/misc/humbug/

Well, that's a blast from my past. :)

You can read more about Blox here: grahamcluley.com/misc/blox/

They seized $4.8m in crypto... then gave the master key to the internet South Korea's National Tax Service (NTS) has found itself in the middle of a deeply embarrassing — and costly — blunder after accidentally handing thieves the master key to a seized cryptocurrenc...

Good news: You seized millions of $$$ worth of cryptocurrency from bad guys!

Bad news: You put a photo of the crypto wallet's seed phrase in your press release...🤦

Read more in my article on the Bitdefender blog: www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/h...

How to lose friends and DDoS people Podcast Episode · Smashing Security · February 26 · 44m

I love “ransomware groups are buffoons” stories! And this weeks @smashingsecurity.com has a good one!
I

It’s a long time ago but I’mpretty sure there were later variants of Cabir that were less obvious.

Could it have been Cabir?

Quite like that the thumbnail here makes me look as if I've just taken massive offfence at something @grahamcluley.com has said.

Deepfake Mugur Isărescu and Florin Talpeș used in fake ‘National Investment Platform’ scam abusing Bitdefender’s name Fraudulent ads running on Meta platforms are promoting a fake investment opportunity branded as the “National Investment Platform,” using a deepfake video of Romanian central bank Governor Mugur Isăre...

Bitdefender is one of the most well-known tech firms in Romania, so it's easy to imagine how people could fall for this scam. Of course, it does not operate, endorse, or participate in any initiatives like this.

Read more from Bitdefender here: www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/h...

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Bogus reviews

A deepfake video brands the fake investment opportunity as "The Bitdefender Project: A New Solution for Financial Independence for Romanians," alongside five-star reviews from bogus investors.

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Screenshot of scam ad, featuring deepfake images of Romania's bank governor and Bitdefender CEO, Florin Talpeș.

The security experts at Bitdefender have uncovered an ad campaign on Facebook promoting a fake investment opportunity in Romania between the country's bank governor and Bitdefender's own CEO, Florin Talpeș.

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Employee about to make a goof

How much do insider security risks cost your company? A new report claims on average it costs firms an astonishing $19.5 million per year! And the figure is going up... because of AI.

Read more in my article on the Fortra blog: www.fortra.com/blog/your-st...

Notorious ransomware gang allegedly blackmailed by fake FSB officer There is a certain poetic justice in a cybersecurity-related story that has emerged from Moscow this week: A man has been accused of trying to extort money.

There is a certain poetic justice in a cybersecurity-related story that has emerged from Moscow this week: A man has been accused of trying to extort money... from a notorious Russian ransomware gang.

Read more in my article on the Bitdefender blog: www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/h...

Because what could possibly go wrong when the people preserving history start to edit it?

We also explore a ransomware gang that managed to outsmart itself - corrupting the very decryption keys its victims would need.

🎧 Listen now in all good podcast apps: pod.link/1195001633/e...

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Smashing Security episode 456: How to lose friends and DDoS people

When an internet archiving service turns its own CAPTCHA page into a weapon...

In the latest "Smashing Security", we dig into claims that a well-known archive site tried to silence a Finnish blogger - with an alleged DDoS, threats of AI-generated smears, and archive tampering...

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$10,000 bounty offered if you can hack Ring cameras to stop them sharing your data with Amazon Did you watch this year's Super Bowl? If you did, maybe you're one of those who were sat at your sofa fuming about Ring camera's TV ad.

Read more in my article on the Bitdefender blog: www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/h...

There has been a huge backlash after Amazon Ring advertised its dystopian surveillance feature "Search party" (dressed up as a way to find lost dogs).

Now a $10,000 award has been offered for a way to run Ring doorbell cameras locally, cutting off the flow of video data to Amazon's servers.

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Spanish police say they have arrested hacker who booked luxury hotel rooms for just one cent Looking back over the years, I've spent an inordinate amount of time when planning a trip trying to find the best online price for my hotel stay.

Imagine if you were able to book €1,000 hotel stays for just one cent? Spanish police say that they have just arrested a hacker who found a way to do just that...

Read more in my article on the Bitdefender blog: www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/h...

#cybersecurity #hacking

Graham Cluley overlooking the Tyne

Blimey. My first ever trip to Newcastle! (I’ve been to Sunderland before but was reliably informed by someone in the audience it didn’t count).

Thanks to the Skills Development Network for the warm welcome and inviting me to speak at their 2026 Digital Conference about the cybersecurity and AI.

He was clearly a hideous individual, who did immeasurable harm to many people's lives.

But man, his spelling was f**king atrocious too...

How to Automatically Archive or Delete Old Emails in Gmail Automatically archive or delete old emails in Gmail with this hack.

But if your inbox contains nothing incriminating, a regular clear-out is simply good digital hygiene.

Here's how to automatically delete old emails from your Gmail archive:

www.howtogeek.com/840555/how-t...

Epstein, who some believe ran a global blackmail operation, couldn't find time to click "empty trash"

Remarkable really.

Of course, I'm not suggesting anyone should be deleting emails to cover their tracks - that would be obstruction of justice... and we've got enough scandals right now

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Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor

Here's the thing, if Jeffrey Epstein had simply set up a basic email filter - nothing fancy, just a little automated rule to permanently delete messages older than, say, thirty days — none of this would be happening.

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Data leak at Abu Dhabi finance summit exposes global figures, FT reports Former British Prime Minister David Cameron and hedge fund billionaire Alan Howard were among the hundreds whose passports and other identification papers were leaked online after they attended an Abu...

Those affected include ex-UK PM David Cameron, former White House comms chief Anthony Scaramucci, and hedge fund billionaire Alan Howard.

This happens far far too often... when is it going to stop?

www.reuters.com/world/middle...

David Cameron and Anthony Scaramucci

Passports and other ID documents of hundreds of attendees at the Abu Dhabi Finance Week (ADFW) conference have been exposed online. More than 700 identify documents were left on an unprotected cloud server that anyone could access via a browser.