The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health has announced that it experienced a phishing attack between Feb. 19 and 20, in which a threat actor accessed the credentials of 53 public health employees.
The credentials were obtained through a phishing email that ultimately allowed the threat actor to compromise the personal information of more than 200,000 people.
“The first domino to fall is very often the well-meaning employee trying to be helpful, but falling into the criminal’s trap,” Dror Liwer, co-founder of cybersecurity company Coro, wrote in an emailed statement to Dark Reading. “Older anti-phishing tools, or those embedded into the email platforms, are simply not designed to deal with sophisticated, well executed phishing attacks.”