Security News

With the coronavirus economic crisis deepening, experts at University of Portsmouth are warning it will lead to the highest levels of fraud and cybercrime ever recorded. Respected economists have predicted the current crisis could lead to a substantial reduction in GDP with lowest estimates of a 7.4 per cent fall and highest estimates of a 35 per cent fall by the OBR. "These predictions could mean fraud levels increasing from at least 30.3 per cent and possibly even doubling if the 35 per cent fall was to occur. These are rough estimates, but illustrate that a substantial increase in fraud is likely as a consequence of the economic downturn."

Cybercrime is evolving since criminals have been quick to seize opportunities to exploit the pandemic by adapting their tactics and engaging in new criminal activities. Cybercriminals have been among the most adept at exploiting the pandemic.

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.

There is a darker side to the Latin American hacking scene. "The cartels aren't using hackers to provide an alternative to drug money, just a relatively easy additional source of income - it's easier to use a hacker to syphon money out of an ATM than to break into one, or rob a bank."

According to the FBI's 2019 Internet Crime Report, released on Tuesday by the bureau's Internet Crime Complaint Center, the total amount of money clawed out of victims through a smorgasbord of cybercrime types just keeps climbing, with 2019 bringing both the highest number of complaints and the highest dollar losses reported since the center was established in May 2000. There were 68,013 people over the age of 60 who reported being victimized last year, and their total reported loss was $835,164,766.

Business email compromise and email account compromise scams are still the most lucrative schemes for cybercriminals: the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center has calculated that, in 2019, the average monetary loss per BEC/EAC scam complaint reached $75,000. During the past year, the IC3 received a total of 467,361 cybercrime complaints with reported losses exceeding $3.5 billion, and $1.77 billion of those are the result of BEC/EAC. For comparison, BEC/EAC-associated losses were $1.3 billion in 2018, $676 million in 2017 and $360 million in 2016.

So says Mieke Eoyang, long-time US government policy adviser and veep of the national security program at Washington DC think tank Third Way. After citing figures from Uncle Sam that show only three in 1,000 cyber-crimes are actually prosecuted - the actual ratio could be closer to three in 100,000 as the FBI tends to underestimate the extent of cyber-crime, she explained - Eoyang said police and agents are either told not to pursue online fraudsters or not given the training and resources to do so.

Aleksei Burkov, an ultra-connected Russian hacker once described as "An asset of supreme importance" to Moscow, has pleaded guilty in a U.S. court to running a site that sold stolen payment card data and to administering a highly secretive crime forum that counted among its members some of the most elite Russian cybercrooks. Burkov, 29, admitted to running CardPlanet, a site that sold more than 150,000 stolen credit card accounts, and to being the founder and administrator of DirectConnection - a closely guarded underground community that attracted some of the world's most-wanted Russian hackers.

Past attacks were often rudimentary in strategy, uncoordinated, and opportunistic. Attacks used generic phishing lures posing as streaming services, banking institutions, or travel agencies.

Is the indictment of April 11 that the extradition cased was based on? If the initial indictment is anything like the DoJ press release of April 11. From the DoJ statement, the purported crimes appear to be: "Hacking" in headline but described as "Cracking" in text, and also 'conspiracy' in both the headline and the text.