Security News
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.
Financial services organizations of all sizes must remain one step ahead of financial crime. Financial services organizations of all sizes rely on Guardian Analytics' sophisticated real-time behavioral analytics and machine learning solutions.
In the first five months of 2020, cryptocurrency crimes have totaled $1.4 billion, indicating that the year 2020 could see the second-highest value in cryptocurrency crimes, outside 2019's whopping $4.5 billion, a CipherTrace report found. The Spring 2020 Cryptocurrency Anti-Money Laundering and Crime report assessed the different tactics cybercriminals are using to commit cryptocurrency offenses.
Britain's National Crime Agency has hit on what looks like a simple way to stop impressionable teens from being sucked into cybercrime - advertise the terrible legal consequences using Google Ads. It sounds too good to be true - can a simple ad deter teen would-be hackers that easily? In fact, the evidence of similar campaigns run by the NCA in the past is that it has some effect.
The TA505 cybercrime group has ramped up its attacks lately, with a set of campaigns bent on spreading the persistent SDBbot remote-access trojan laterally throughout an entire corporate environment, researchers said. SDBbot RAT is a custom job that has been observed in TA505 attacks since at least September 2019; it offers remote-access capabilities and has a few spyware aspects, including the ability to exfiltrate data from the victimized devices and networks.
Sophisticated state-supported actors are following cybercriminals in exploiting the coronavirous pandemic and posing an "Advanced persistent threat", French defence technology giant Thales warned Monday. Hades, linked to the APT28 which is believed to be of Russian origin and behind an attack on the US Democrat party in 2016, was the first state-backed group to use the epidemic as bait, Thales' cyber intelligence service reported.