Security News

What drives the cyber-crime economy, and how can organizations prevent their data being used as a criminal commodity?

The British teenager accused of being part of the gang that hacked Twitter and posted a cryptocurrency scam from various US celebrities' accounts has not yet been arrested. Mason Sheppard, a 19-year-old of Bognor Regis in the English county of West Sussex, has been visited by the National Crime Agency but no arrests have been made on this side of the Atlantic.

Fake audio or video content has been ranked by experts as the most worrying use of artificial intelligence in terms of its potential applications for crime or terrorism, according to a new UCL report. The study identified 20 ways AI could be used to facilitate crime over the next 15 years.

Computer misuse crimes across England and Wales have declined over the past year - with credential theft attacks remaining more or less flat in the pre-COVID reporting period. The Crime Survey of England and Wales recorded a total of 876,000 incidents of computer misuse affecting 743,000 adults across the UK over the past year, a figure that was down by 9 per cent on 2019's total of 966,000 incidents.

An Instagram super-star with 2.3 million followers has been extradited to America accused of conspiring to launder hundreds of millions of dollars obtained via cyber-crime. Abbas allegedly ran so-called business email compromise scams, which typically involve hijacking email accounts, or impersonating strangers in emails, to fool victims into transferring money to the scammer's bank account rather than a legit recipient.

An Instagram super-star with 2.3 million followers has been extradited to America accused of conspiring to launder hundreds of millions of dollars obtained via cyber-crime. Abbas allegedly ran so-called business email compromise scams, which typically involve hijacking email accounts, or impersonating strangers in emails, to fool victims into transferring money to the scammer's bank account rather than a legit recipient.

"There doesn't seem to be any mitigation of the growing trend of online crime. The first line of defense from online fraud is not a technology solution or even law enforcement; it's user awareness. From a policy perspective, governments and other institutions should get the word out more so that individuals and organizations are more sensitive to online threats." The most popular internet crimes tracked by the FBI were extortion, government impersonation, and business email compromise, which cost victims $1.8 billion in 2019.

More than 1,000 technology experts and academics from organizations such as MIT, Microsoft, Harvard and Google have signed an open letter denouncing a forthcoming paper describing artificial intelligence algorithms that can predict crime based only on a person's face, calling it out for promoting racial bias and propagating a #TechtoPrisonPipeline. The paper describes an "Automated computer facial recognition software capable of predicting whether someone is likely going to be a criminal," according to a press release about the research.

Amazon announced it has established a new Counterfeit Crimes Unit, dedicated to bringing counterfeiters that violate the law and Amazon's policies by listing counterfeit products in its store to justice. Amazon's Counterfeit Crimes Unit is a global, multi-disciplinary team composed of former federal prosecutors, experienced investigators, and data analysts, and will join Amazon's extensive work to drive counterfeit to zero.

Known as BlueLeaks, the info trove consists mostly of crime intelligence material uploaded to what are known as fusion centers. Created in the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks, serve as a way for state and county cops to share information with one another and with the FBI and US Homeland security.