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Cyberattacks are raising your prices (Lock and Code S07E09)

✇Malwarebytes

This week on the Lock and Code podcast…

Your prices could be going up because of a little something that one group has started calling the “cyber tax.”

Not a “tax” in any regulatory sense of the word, this newly named “cyber tax” is instead a consequence of the growing number of cyberattacks on small businesses. According to the latest research from the Identity Theft Resource Center, 81% of small- and medium-sized businesses suffered a data breach, a security breach, or both, within the past year. And of those businesses, more than 50% of lost more than $250,000.

According to the most recent data from the US Federal Reserve, the median American family has just $8,000 in savings, meaning that a hit of $250,000 could bankrupt a family and turn their lives upside down. But there’s an interesting layer within this data—the median American family is quite similar to the median American business. In fact, they’re often the exact same person.

The local grocer, the nearby HVAC repair service, the avid cyclist who just opened a bike shop, and the tax professional, and physical therapist helping out neighbors are everyday individuals and family members. They do not have multimillion dollar corporations at their backs, supporting them with legal teams, insurance policies, and dedicated IT support teams.

A loss of $250,000, then, is a potential loss of their business. And to stay afloat, the Identity Theft Resource Center found, for the first time ever, that 38% decided to raise their prices.

“It was near 40% said ‘We actually had to raise prices—we had to pass this cost onto our customers,’” said Eva Velasquez, CEO of the Identity Theft Resource Center. “We’re now really seeing the long-term downstream effects of cyberattacks.”

As frustrating as the cyber tax can be, small businesses themselves are also facing a new wave of cyberattacks, from AI-powered phishing emails so convincing that small business owners can’t tell the legitimate from the illegitimate, to deepfake calls that impersonate the CEO of a three-person company, to supply-chain attacks that target small companies as a way to reach bigger ones.  

Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Velasquez about cybercrime’s impact on small businesses, the new threats being deployed because of AI, and what is necessary to protect business owners and their consumers.

“Great businesses with great protocols in place can still have a vulnerability exploited because this is what the cyber bad guys are doing all day long. They only have to be right once, whereas small business owners have to be right 100% of the time.”

Tune in today to listen to the full conversation.

Show notes and credits:

Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)

Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn’t just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.

Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium Security for Lock and Code listeners.

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How Claude Planted Malicious Code In A Crypto-Trading App

✇The Security Ledger
Por:Paul Roberts

A malicious campaign by North Korean state actors saw a malicious npm package dependency slipped into a crypto trading agent by an AI coding agent, according to a new report by ReversingLabs. The incident highlights a troubling new frontier in software supply chain attacks: hackers targeting developers...and the AI tools writing their code.

The post How Claude Planted Malicious Code In A Crypto-Trading App appeared first on The Security Ledger with Paul F. Roberts.

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Big Tech can stop scams. They just don’t (Lock and Code S07E08)

✇Malwarebytes

This week on the Lock and Code podcast…

A dreadful thing happens far too often whenever an older adult falls for a scam: They get blamed for it. Not the scammers who lied and cheated their victim out of money. Not law enforcement for failing to recover funds. Not even the Big Tech companies that could have the most important role in protecting people online—and which, it turns out, knowingly bring in revenue every year from fraud.

Instead, it is the older adults themselves whose stories are often shirked aside because of a mix of ageism and denial. Allegedly left behind by technology, only an octogenarian would hand their password over in a phishing scheme, or open an email attachment from a stranger, or send money to a fake charity online. Everyone else, everyone else believes, is too savvy for the same.

The data disagrees.

When Malwarebytes studied this last year, it found that, depending on the type of scam—especially for things like “sextortion”—younger individuals were far more likely to report falling victim. Further, digging into data from the US Federal Trade Commission revealed entirely separate patterns. For example, while Americans between the ages of 80 and 89 reported the highest median loss due to fraud in 2024, they also made up the smallest share of their population to report a loss at all. And in 2025, that same group represented the smallest share of reported identity theft, a crime far more likely to be reported by people between 30 and 39.

Questions about who reports what crimes at what rate are valid to explore, but it’s important to see the big picture: Americans lost at least $15.9 billion to fraud last year. Protecting older adults is actually about protecting everyone, and that’s because modern scams don’t arrive only where people over 70 spend time. They arrive where we all are, which is online. They come through endless text messages, they slide into social media DMs, and they prey on things any of us can be—a widow, a divorcee, or simply a lonely person.

According to Marti DeLiema, Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota’s School of Social Work, scams and fraud are now the most common form of organized crime globally, rivaling weapons trafficking, drug trafficking, human trafficking, and sex trafficking. In 2024 alone, she said, the FTC estimated that older adults in the US had as much as $81.5 billion stolen from them. And the tools meant to fight back—broad consumer awareness campaigns, embedded warning messages at the point of transaction, the training of bank tellers and retail clerks—are nowhere near keeping pace.

So what actually works? And who, if anyone, is doing the work?

Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with DeLiema about who is really susceptible to financial fraud, why victims often describe a scam as a form of betrayal trauma, and why the companies best positioned to stop scam messages from reaching consumers may be the ones least motivated to do so.

“This is not a technical capability problem at all. This is a conflict of incentives.”

Tune in today to listen to the full conversation.

Show notes and credits:

Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)

Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn’t just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.

Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium Security for Lock and Code listeners.

❌