Security News
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.
Sometimes hackers are given more leeway based on why they hack. In a blog post published Thursday, Check Point detailed the exploits of a hacker self-dubbed "VandaTheGod," describing how this person turned from hacktivist to cybercriminal before being identified and reported to law enforcement.
The move to remote working spurred by the coronavirus pandemic has triggered a surge in the use of cloud services. Based on cloud-usage data from 30 million McAfee MVISION cloud users between January and April 2020, the security provider found a 50% increase overall in the use of cloud services.
The hackers have now turned to Dark Web auction houses instead. "Putting the data out there for free to do extortion or to leverage the extortion isn't effective because now the police are involved, the FBI is involved, the Secret Service is involved because Trump was mentioned. They then turned to this auction house called Jokerbuzz," Turnage said. Because of DarkOwl's work offering access to the world's largest dataset of Dark Net and deep web content, the company's researchers have seen the files related to Lady Gaga, Sherwood, and the initial documents related to President Trump.
There has been an exponential growth in phishing and website scams in Q1 2020, according to a Bolster analysis of over 1 billion websites. Of the total number of confirmed phishing and counterfeit pages, 30% were related to COVID-19 - that is over a quarter of a million confirmed malicious websites.
Cybercriminals have been busy devising email campaigns that take advantage of the coronavirus outbreak. In a blog post published Monday, Lastline said that it's detected a variety of threats centered around COVID-19, and many of these threats are infostealers.
Bad actors matched their cyber attack strategy with the increasing uncertainty of the coronavirus epidemic, according to a new analysis from Mimecast. Over the 14 weeks that Mimecast analyzed, detections increased during seven weeks, decreased during five weeks, and showed no change during two weeks.
Cybercriminals have taken notice as well, increasingly lacing popular movie torrents with dangerous malware that can damage your device. In a recent thread on Twitter, Microsoft Security Intelligence wrote at length that the team saw malware attached to torrents for popular "John Wick 3" and "Contagion" in Spain, Mexico, and a number of South American countries.
These restrictions have created a burgeoning underground market for reshipping scams, which rely on willing or unwitting residents in the United States and Europe - derisively referred to as "Reshipping mules" - to receive and relay high-dollar stolen goods to crooks living in the embargoed areas. Still, every dark cloud has a silver lining: Intel 471 noted many cybercriminals appear optimistic that the impending global economic recession "Will make it easier to recruit low-level accomplices such as money mules."
A new report from BleepingComputer found that cybercriminals are selling and trading the credentials for more than 500,000 Zoom accounts associated with companies like Chase and Citibank as well as schools like Dartmouth College, the University of Florida, and the University of Vermont. Earlier this month, a report from cybersecurity firm IntSights by cyber threat analyst Charity Wright and chief security officer Etay Maor found that there has been increased chatter across the dark web about ways to take advantage of the increased usage of Zoom globally.