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If you’re in the market for insurance right now, keep an eye out for scammers in the mix. They’re out in full force once again this open enrollment season.
As people across the U.S. sign up for, renew, or change their health insurance plans, scammers want to cash in as people rush to get their coverage set. And scammers have several factors working in their favor.
For starters, many people find the insurance marketplace confusing, frustrating, and even intimidating, all feelings that scammers can take advantage of. Moreover, concerns about getting the right level of coverage at an affordable price also play into the hands of scammers.
Amidst all this uncertainty and time pressure, health insurance scams crop up online. Whether under the guise of helping people navigate the complex landscape or by offering seemingly low-cost quotes, scammers prey on insurance seekers by stealing their personal information, Social Security numbers, and money.
According to the FBI, health insurance scams cost families millions each year. In some cases, the costs are up front. People pay for fraudulent insurance and have their personal info stolen. And for many, the follow-on costs are far worse, where victims go in for emergency care and find that their treatment isn’t covered—leaving them with a hefty bill.
Like so many of the scams we cover here in our blogs, you can spot health insurance scams relatively quickly once you get to know their ins and outs.
Here’s how some of those scams can play out.
Some are “one and done scams” where the scammer promises a policy or service and then disappears after stealing money and personal info—much like an online shopping scam. It’s a quick and dirty hit where scammers quickly get what they want by reaching victims the usual ways, such as through texts, emails, paid search results, and social media. In the end, victims end up on a phishing site where they think they’re locking in a good deal but handing over their info to scammers instead.
Other scams play a long con game, milking victims for thousands and thousands of dollars over time. The following complaint lodged by one victim in Washington state provides a typical example:
A man purchased a plan to cover himself, his wife, and his two children, only to learn there was no coverage. He was sold a second policy, with the same result, and offered a refund if he purchased a third policy. When he filed a complaint, his family still had no coverage, and he was seeking a refund for more than $20,000 and reimbursement for $55,000 in treatments and prescriptions he’d paid out of pocket.
Scams like these are known as ghost broker scams where scammers pose as insurance brokers who take insurance premiums and pocket the money, leaving victims thinking they have coverage when they don’t. In some cases, scammers initially apply for a genuine policy with a legitimate carrier, only to cancel it later, while still taking premiums from the victim as their “broker.” Many victims only find out that they got scammed when they attempt to file a claim.
Another type of scam comes in the form of policy cancellation scams. These work like any number of other account-based scams, where a scammer pretends to be a customer service rep at a bank, utility, or credit card company. In the insurance version of it, scammers email, text, or call with some bad news—the person’s policy is about to get cancelled. Yet not to worry, the victim can keep the policy active they hand over some personal and financial info. It’s just one more way that scammers use urgency and fear to steal to commit identity theft and fraud.
As said, health insurance scams become relatively easy to spot once you know the tricks that scammers use. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) offers up its list of the ones they typically use the most:
1)Someone says they’re from the government and need money or your personal info.Government agencies don’t call people out of the blue to ask them for money or personal info. No one from the government will ask you to verify your Social Security, bank account, or credit card number, and they won’t ask you to wire money or pay by gift card or cryptocurrency.
If you have a question about Health Insurance Marketplace®, contact the government directly at: HealthCare.gov or 1-800-318-2596
2) Someone tries to sell you a medical discount plan. Legitimate medical discount plans differ from health insurance. They supplement it. In that way, they don’t pay for any of your medical expenses. Rather, they’re membership programs where you pay a recurring fee for access to a network of providers who offer their services at pre-negotiated, reduced rates. The FTC strongly advises thorough research before participating in one, as some take people’s money and offer very little in return. Call your caregiver and see if they really participate in the program and in what way. And always review the details of any medical discount plan in writing before you sign up.
3) Someone wants your sensitive personal info in exchange for a price quote. The Affordable Care Act’s (ACA’s) official government site is HealthCare.gov. It lets you compare prices on health insurance plans, check your eligibility for healthcare subsidies, and begin enrollment. But HealthCare.gov will only ask for your monthly income and your age to give you a price quote. Never enter personal financial info like your Social Security number, bank account, or credit card number to get a quote for health insurance.
4) Someone wants money to help you navigate the Health Insurance Marketplace. The people who offer legitimate help with the Health Insurance Marketplace (sometimes called Navigators or Assisters) are not allowed to charge you and won’t ask you for personal or financial info. If they ask for money, it’s a scam. Go to HealthCare.govand click “Find Local Help” to learn more.
1)For health insurance, visit a trusted source like HealthCare.gov or your state marketplace. Doing so helps guarantee that you’ll get the kind of fully compliant coverage you want.
2) Make sure the insurance covers you in your state. Not every insurer is licensed to operate in your state. Double-check that the one you’re dealing with is. A good place to start is to visit the site for your state’s insurance commission. It should have resources that let you look up the insurance companies, agents, and brokers in your state.
3) For any insurance, research the company offering it. Run a search with the company name and add “scam” or “fraud” to it. See if any relevant news or complaints show up. And if the plan you’re being offered sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
4) Watch out for high-pressure sales. Don’t pay anything up front and be cautious if a company is forcing you to make quick decisions.
5) Guard your personal info. Never share your personal info, account details, or Social Security number over text or email. Make sure you’re really working with a legitimate company and that you submit any info through a secure submissions process.
6) Block bad links to phishing sites. Many insurance scams rely on phishing sites to steal personal info. A combination of our Web Protection and Scam Detector can steer you clear of them. They’ll alert you if a link might take you to one. It’ll also block those sites if you accidentally tap or click on a bad link.
7) Monitor your identity and credit. In some health insurance scams, your personal info winds up in wrong hands, which can lead to identity fraud and theft. And the problem is that you only find out once the damage is done. Actively monitoring your identity and credit can spot a problem before it becomes an even bigger one. You can take care of both easily with our identity monitoring and credit monitoring.
Additionally, our identity theft coverage can help if the unexpected happens with up to $2 million in identity theft coverage and identity restoration support if determined you’re a victim of identity theft.
You’ll find these protections and more in McAfee+.
The post How To Spot Health Insurance Scams This Open Enrollment Season appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Suspected Chinese-government-linked threat actors have been battering a maximum-severity Cisco AsyncOS zero-day vulnerability in some Secure Email Gateway (SEG) and Secure Email and Web Manager (SEWM) appliances for nearly a month, and there's no timeline for a fix.…
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Just finished reading ActiveFence’s emerging threats assessment on 7 major models across hate speech, disinfo, fraud, and CSAM-adjacent prompts.
Key findings are: 44% of outputs were rated risky, 68% of unsafe ones were hate-speech-related, and only a single model landed in the safe range.
What really jumps out is how different vendors behave per abuse area (fraud looks relatively well-covered, hate and child safety really don’t).
For those doing your own evals/red teaming: are you seeing similar per-category gaps? Has anyone brought in an external research partner like ActiveFence to track emerging threats over time?
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Imagine a day where you didn’t have to juggle passwords.
No more sticky notes. No more notebooks with dozens of passwords scribbled in, crossed out, and scribbled in again. No more forgetting and resetting. No more typing them in all the time.
And even better, imagine secure accounts, likely even more secure than you could keep them on your own.
That’s the power of a password manager in your life.
A password manager does the work of creating strong, unique passwords for each and every one of your accounts. And considering the hundred or so accounts you have, that’s something that would take plenty of time if you did all that work on your own.
In all, a password manager can turn the pain of juggling passwords into a real comfort.
Before we get into how a password manager can make your life easier while making your accounts more secure, let’s look at what makes up a bad password. Here are a few examples:
Obvious passwords: Password-cracking programs start by entering a list of common (and arguably lazy) passwords. These may include the simple “password” or “1234567”. Others include common keyboard paths like “qwerty.” Even longer keyboard paths like “qwertyuiop” are well known to hackers and their tools as well.
Dictionary words: Hacking tools also look for common dictionary words strung together, which helps them crack longer passwords in chunks. The same goes for passwords that contain the name of the app or service in them. These are “no brainer” words found in passwords that make passwords even easier to crack.
Repeated passwords: You may think you have such an unbreakable password that you want to use it for all your accounts. However, this means that if hackers compromise one of your accounts, all your other accounts are vulnerable. This is a favorite tactic of hackers. They’ll target less secure accounts and services and then attempt to re-use those credentials on more secure services like online bank and credit card companies.
Personal information passwords: Passwords that include your birthday, dog’s name, or nickname leave you open to attack. While they’re easy for you to remember, they’re also easy for a hacker to discover—such as with a quick trip to your social media profile, particularly if it is not set to private.
If any of the above sounds familiar, you’ll want to replace any of your bad passwords with strong ones.
We can point to three things that make up a strong password, which makes it difficult to hack.
Your password is:
Long: A longer password is potentially a stronger password when it comes to a “brute force” attack, where a hacker uses an automated trial-and-error system to break it. For example, an eight-character password using uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols can get hacked in minutes. Kick it up to 16 characters and it becomes incredibly more difficult to break—provided it doesn’t rely on common words or phrases. McAfee can help you generate a strong password, for stronger security with our random password generator.
Complex: To increase the security of your password, it should have a combination of uppercase letters, lowercase letters, symbols, and numbers like mentioned above.
Unique: Every one of your accounts should have its own password.
Now, apply this to the hundred or so accounts you keep and creating strong passwords for all of them really does call for a lot of work.
Given its ease of use and the big security boost it gives you and all your accounts, the answer is yes.
A password manager does the work of creating strong, unique passwords for your accounts. These will take the form of a string of random numbers, letters, and characters. They won’t be memorable, but the manager does the memorizing for you. You only need to remember a single password to access the tools of your manager.
A strong password manager also stores your passwords securely. Our password manager protects your passwords by scrambling them with AES-256, one of the strongest encryption algorithms available. Only you can decrypt and access your info with the factors you choose. Additionally, our password manager uses multi-factor authentication (MFA), so you’ll be verified by at least two factors before being signed in.
Aside from the comfort of convenience a password manager can give you, it gives you another level of assurance—extra protection in an age of data breaches, because you’ll have unique passwords where one compromise won’t lead to others.
And whether or not you go with a password manager to create those strong and unique passwords, make sure you use MFA on every account that offers it. MFA offers another layer of protection by adding another factor into the login process, such as something you own like a text to your phone or notification to an authentication app. That way if a hacker has your password, they’ll still be locked out of your account because they lack that MFA code.
In some cases, you really don’t need some of your old accounts and the passwords that come along with them. Maybe they’re old and unused. Or maybe they were for a one-time purchase at an online store you won’t visit again. Deleting these accounts is a smart move because they’re yet more places where your personal info is stored—and subject to a data breach.
Our Online Account Cleanup can help, which you can find in all our McAfee+ plans. It scans for accounts in your name, gives you a full list, and shows you which types of accounts might be riskier than others. From there you can decide which ones you want to delete, along with the personal info linked to them. In our McAfee+ Ultimate plans, you get full-service Online Account Cleanup, which sends the data deletion requests for you.
Between this and a password manager, you’ll have one less thing to juggle—your passwords, and one less thing to worry about—if they’re secure from hackers.
The post Why “Strong Passwords” Aren’t Enough Anymore—and What to Do Instead appeared first on McAfee Blog.
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Perhaps it's just the time of year where we all start to wind down a bit, or maybe I'm just tired after another massive 12 months, but this week's vid is way late. Ok, going away to the place that had just been breached (ironic!) didn't help, but I think in general the pace we've maintained this year just needs to come back a bit. That said, I'll try to get this week's and next week's out on time, then it's off on travels for the next four weeks after that. Stay tuned for more IoT problems in a few days from now 🤦♂️
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Freedom of the Press Foundation is developing Dangerzone, an open-source tool that uses multiple layers of containerization (gVisor, Linux containers) to sanitize untrusted documents. The target users of this tool are people who may be vulnerable to malware attacks, such as journalists and activists. To ensure that Dangerzone is adequately secure, it received a favorable security audit in December 2023, but never had a bug bounty program until now.
We are kick-starting a limited bug bounty program for this holiday season, that challenges the popular adage "containers don't contain". The premise is simple; sent Santa a naughty letter, and its team of elves will run it by Dangerzone. If your letter breaks a containerization layer by capturing a flag, you get the associated bounty. Have fun!
For the past several years I've been trying intermittently to get Cross Translation Unit taint analysis with clang static analyzer working for Firefox. While the efforts _have_ found some impactful bugs, overall the project has burnt out because of too many issues in LLVM we are unable to overcome.
Not everything you do succeeds, and I think it's important to talk about what _doesn't_ succeed just as much (if not more) about what does.
With the help of an LLVM contractor, we've authored this post to talk about our attempts, and some of the issues we'd run into.
I'm optimistic that people will get CTU taint analysis working on projects the size of Firefox, and if you do, well I guess I'll see you in the bounty committee meetings ;)
FreshRSS 