Archive for November 14, 2025

AI-powered Black Friday scams are Evolving Fast: Forcepoint X-Labs

Posted in Commentary with tags on November 14, 2025 by itnerd

Here’s a timely piece of research just published by Forcepoint’s X-Labs team and authored by Lydia McElligott, Security Researcher, titled “How AI is Fueling a New Wave of Black Friday Scams” 

Given the upcoming holiday sales surge, this one (with a number of visual examples included) hits at the intersection of cybersecurity, retail behavior and the AI threat landscape.

Three key take-aways from the research:

  • AI is raising the stakes. Scams this year don’t look like the old “cheap deal” bait—they’re polished, coherent and realistic: phishing emails that mirror brand templates, cloned retail websites spun up in minutes, fake social-media ads. 
  • Trusted brands are primary targets. Attackers are leveraging familiarity with brands like Amazon, Temu and luxury labels to build trust and urgency in their scams. 
  • Defensive behaviours still work—but they require discipline. The article outlines actionable red flags: inspecting sender domains, hovering rather than clicking links, really questioning “too-good-to-be-true” discounts and using secure payment methods. 

The post is at: https://www.forcepoint.com/blog/x-labs/black-friday-scams-ai-phishing-guide

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TELUS launches quantum-safe VPN to protect businesses against future cyber threats

Posted in Commentary with tags on November 14, 2025 by itnerd

TELUS has announced the launch of its Quantum-Safe VPN service, reinforcing the company’s position as a cybersecurity leader by offering commercial Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) protection to Canadian businesses. The innovative service aims to address future cyber threats from quantum computing technology, delivering next-generation security solutions today.

Recognizing that quantum computers may eventually be powerful enough to break current encryption methods, posing a significant future threat to data security, TELUS is proactively delivering a solution today that aims to protect customers tomorrow. The new service uses advanced encryption technology integrated with the TELUS Managed Next Generation Firewall service, empowering businesses to stay ahead of evolving cyber threats.

The global cybersecurity consensus confirms that the transition to a post-quantum world is a matter of ‘when,’ not ‘if’. This new service provides a crucial solution for government agencies and businesses that need to defend against these future threats.

TELUS’ Quantum-Safe VPN service delivers three key benefits:

  • Enhanced Customer Security: Provides enhanced customer data protection against future cyber attacks, meeting requirements from global security organizations
  • Future-Proofed Business Continuity: Provides long-term protection for intellectual property and sensitive data, supporting businesses secure growth 
  • Simplified Compliance: Helps customers prepare for new cybersecurity regulations and standards

Leveraging Palo Alto Networks technology, TELUS’ service uses advanced encryption methods recommended by leading security organizations and offers flexibility to adapt as new security standards emerge. This approach protects sensitive information from being captured today and potentially decoded by future quantum computers. Learn more about TELUS Quantum-Safe VPN service here.

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Hammerspace to Showcase Latest Software Release, New AI Data Platform Solution and Latest Performance Achievements at SC25

Posted in Commentary with tags on November 14, 2025 by itnerd

Hammerspace today announced it will showcase its latest capabilities at Supercomputing 2025 (SC25), taking place at the America’s Center Convention Complex in Saint Louis from November 17-20. At its booth #3523, Hammerspace will demonstrate its AI solution, aligned with the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design, to streamline data access for agentic AI applications. The solution enables seamless data access and orchestration across hybrid environments, ensuring that AI workloads always have instant access to the right data, without manual intervention or complex integration.

Through automated data objectives and tight integration with AI agents, Hammerspace’s platform intelligently tags, tiers and places data where it’s needed most, optimizing for both performance and cost. This automation ensures that AI models can train and infer faster, with data continuously in motion to meet the needs of high-performance computing (HPC) environments.

Hammerspace will also highlight its Tier 0 solution, which transforms the local NVMe storage within GPU clusters into a shared, high-performance storage tier. This capability delivers the ultra-low latency and high throughput demanded by AI training, checkpointing, inference and agentic AI workloads, all while maximizing existing GPU investments.

To schedule a meeting with Hammerspace executives during SC25, click here.

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The Threat Actors That I’ve Been Tracking Have Moved To Using TD For Their Phishing Campaign

Posted in Commentary with tags on November 14, 2025 by itnerd

Let me get you up to speed in case you’re tuning in for the first time.

I’ve been tracking a group of threat actors who started using Questrade and then Wealthsimple along with TD and finally the National Bank on two occasions to try and phish credentials from unsuspecting users in order to drain their bank accounts dry. And whomever is behind this campaign has got some degree of skill as for the most part, they have sent convincing phishing emails and have built convincing websites to back up those emails.

It now seems that the threat actors are back to using TD to try and pull off their scam based on this email that my honeypot got:

If this email looks familiar, that’s because it’s the same text that was used by the last National Bank phishing email. Only now it’s branded for TD. Which means that it’s the same threat actor at work here. Now when I tried to access the phishing website, it had already been shut down. But it was hosted by the same Chinese hosting company that hosted the second phishing attempt made by these scammers. Now to be clear, just because it is hosted by a Chinese company does not mean that the threat actors are Chinese. Though it would not surprise me if they were.

This likely means that my honeypot will see some more action. Though I have to wonder how long this campaign will continue. I guess I will find out.

UPDATE: A few minutes after posting this, my honeypot this email claiming to be from National Bank. Clearly the threat actors are flipping back and forth between banks in hopes of getting more victims.

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