Security News

Financial cybercrime in 2021 is set to evolve, researchers say, with extortion practices becoming more widespread, ransomware gangs consolidating and advanced exploits being used more effectively to target victims. According to Kasperky, ransomware - above all - will continue to be a main scourge in the year ahead. "Due to their successful operations and extensive media coverage this year, the threat actors behind targeted ransomware systematically increased the amounts victims were expected to pay in exchange for not publishing stolen information," researchers said in a Monday posting.

Britain's National Crime Agency arrested six men in London on suspicion of laundering "Tens of millions" for the Trickbot and Dridex banking malware gangs, the not-quite-police agency declared today. The six, a mixture of British and Eastern European citizens, were arrested around a year ago, said the NCA as EU police agency Europol jointly boasted of a further 14 arrests in the political bloc, the US and Australia.

Jumio announced that the company acquired the AML platform from Beam Solutions, a San Francisco-based startup focused on transaction monitoring and KYC. Jumio will integrate Beam's suite of AML solutions into its current KYX Platform to further strengthen the company's position in the anti-financial crime marketplace. Beam's mission is to make the financial system safer by applying creative technological innovation to the detection and reporting of suspicious financial activity that facilitates money laundering, terrorism and human trafficking.

As Uber's chief security officer, Joe Sullivan broke the law by hushing up the theft of millions of people's details from the app maker's databases by hackers, prosecutors say. According to the government, the charges [PDF] stem from Sullivan's efforts to cover up the 2016 security breach at Uber in which miscreants siphoned from internal databases the personal information of 57 million passengers and 600,000 drivers, including their driving license details.

NICE Actimize announced the launch of its newest platform, NICE Actimize Xceed, which integrates best-in-class AI, data intelligence, behavioral analytics, and insights within a unified cloud platform designed to bring agility to financial institutions of all sizes, including community and regional banks, that are looking to modernize their financial crime risk management solutions. With "Always On" AI-based technology, NICE Actimize Xceed's self-learning capabilities immediately and autonomously adapt to new threats, helping financial institutions meet today's dynamic risk management needs with laser accuracy, speed and simplicity, and without the need for a team of data scientists.

A study explores the possible range and risk of attacks from military robots and autonomous attack drones to AI-assisted stalking. A study published in the journal Crime Science analyzed a vast spectrum of AI-enabled crimes in the years ahead ranging from military robots and autonomous attack drones to AI-assisted stalking.

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.