Security News
A Latvian woman has been charged with developing malicious software used by a cybercrime organization that infected computers worldwide and looted bank accounts of millions of dollars, the Justice Department said Friday. Alla Witte is charged as part of a 47-count indictment with participating in an organization known as the Trickbot Group, which authorities say operated in Russia and several other countries.
The Interpol has intercepted $83 million belonging to victims of online financial crime from being transferred to the accounts of their attackers. Between September 2020 and March 2021, law enforcement focused on battling five types of online financial crimes: investment fraud, romance scams, money laundering associated with illegal online gambling, online sextortion, and voice phishing.
Colonial Pipeline CEO Joseph Blount later acknowledged that his company ultimately paid the cybercriminals $4.4 million to unlock company systems, generating a great deal of controversy around the simple question, of whether companies should pay when their systems are held hostage by ransomware. Rather than debating what's ultimately a moral and ethical question that's been around since the dawn of humanity, the proper debate we should be having is about the critical role of technology at non-technology companies.
While privateer cybercriminal groups are not specifically state-sponsored, they may carry out activities of the protecting state anyway due to pressure to engage in specific actions or target specific entities, according to the post. Privateers fall in the third tier of cybercrime groups below those specifically sponsored by governments at the top, commonly known as APTs and which receive explicit direction and financial support by a nation-state.
SpecTrust, a no-code, risk-defense layer to unify people, data, and technology in the fight against cybercrime, emerged from stealth, announcing $4.3M in funding. Through the SpecTrust platform, customers can unify data and risk signals into comprehensive defense that deploys instantly.
The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center has seen a massive 100% in cybercrime complaints over the past 14 months. When the IC3 first began logging complaints in 2000, it took seven years to reach 1 million complaints.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation says its Internet Crime Complaint Center received more than one million cybercrime complaints over the past 14 months. Established in 2000 as the Internet Fraud Complaint Center and renamed in 2002, IC3 has received a total of 6 million complaints to date.
The team behind Exploit, a major cybercrime forum used by ransomware gangs to hire affiliates and advertise their Ransomware-as-a-Service services, has announced that ransomware ads are now banned and will be removed. The move follows the announcement made by the XSS Russian-speaking hacking forum yesterday about ransomware topics being permanently banned.
Four individuals from Eastern Europe face 20 years in prison for Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization charges after pleading guilty to running a bulletproof hosting service as a safe haven for cybercrime operations targeting US entities. The bulletproof hosting service was founded by Russian citizens Aleksandr Grichishkin and Andrei Skvortsov, who hired Lithuanian Aleksandr Skorodumov and Estonian Pavel Stassi as the organization's system admin and administrator, respectively.
A new threat actor that appears to be financially motivated has targeted many organizations in the United States and other countries using several new pieces of malware, FireEye reported on Tuesday. The phishing campaign conducted by UNC2529 targeted a wide range of organizations, and involved the use of a sizable command and control infrastructure, three sophisticated malware families, and custom lures.