Security News
The term long tail first emerged in 2004, created by WIRED editor-in-chief Chris Anderson to describe "The new marketplace." His theory is that our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "Hits" at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. You determine how to aggregate the events in a way that provides enough meaning for analysis.
On April 4th, INTERPOL delivered a rare warning to hospitals around the world to be on high alert for imminent cyber-attacks. While hospitals struggle to keep pace with a global pandemic, the number of ransomware attacks targeting organizations critical to virus response has also increased.
Don Smith, the firm's senior director of cyber intelligence, told The Register: "The threat level is pretty much constant but the actors have significantly shifted their focus, their lures and their phishes to almost exclusive focus on COVID-19," adding: "But that's just the same lures and phishes that would have been coming out with a different subject matter four months ago." "Because of the global appeal of COVID-19 and the longevity of it, everyone's kind of converged on the same theme at the same time," he said.
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.