Security News
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.
Both the overall number of complaints and the total reported financial losses went up compared to 2018, when IC3 received 351,937 complaints, for a total of $2.7 billion reported losses. The total losses from reported Internet crime over the past five years has surpassed $10.2 billion and the IC3 received a total of 1,707,618 complaints during this period, at an average of more than 340,000 complaints per year.
Businesses and individuals lost $3.5 billion to cybercriminals last year while reporting more incidents of internet crime to the FBI than any year previously, according to the bureau's Internet Core Competency Certification 2019 Internet Crime Report, which was released on Tuesday. People reported 467,361 complaints of cybercrime to the FBI in 2019-an average of nearly 1,300 incidents every day, and more than 100,000 more than the year prior, according to the report.
Russia is still using social media in a sustained campaign to dabble in US affairs, according to FBI director Chris Wray. Wray, speaking at a House Judiciary Hearing on FBI Oversight on Wednesday 5 February, said that Russia is still engaged in an "Information warfare" campaign against the US, according to a report by the Associated Press.
FBI Director Chris Wray said Wednesday that Russia is engaged in "Information warfare" heading into the 2020 presidential election, though he said law enforcement has not seen ongoing efforts by Russia to target America's election infrastructure. "Unlike a cyberattack on an election infrastructure, that kind of effort - disinformation - in a world where we have a First Amendment and believe strongly in freedom of expression, the FBI is not going to be in the business of being the truth police and monitoring disinformation online," Wray said.
The FBI reportedly warned this week that attackers repeatedly attempted to disrupt a state's voter registration and information website with a distributed denial-of-service attack. On Tuesday, the FBI issued a Private Industry Notification that described the attempted DDoS attack, according to Bleeping Computer, which says it obtained a copy of the alert.
The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center has issued an alert warning that fraudsters are using spoofed job application portals and websites to steal personal information, including payment card details, from would-be applicants. "Cybercriminals now pose as legitimate employers by spoofing company websites and posting fake job openings on popular online job boards," according to the FBI alert.
More than two years ago, Apple told the FBI that it planned to offer users end-to-end encryption when storing their phone data on iCloud, according to one current and three former FBI officials and one current and one former Apple employee. Under that plan, primarily designed to thwart hackers, Apple would no longer have a key to unlock the encrypted data, meaning it would not be able to turn material over to authorities in a readable form even under court order.
In spite of Apple having turned over the shooter's iCloud backups in the case of the Pensacola, Florida mass shooting last month, the US government has been raking it over the coals for supposedly not helping law enforcement in investigations. Specifically, according to six sources - Reuters relied on the input of one current and three former FBI officials and one current and one former Apple employee - a few years ago, Apple, under pressure from the FBI, backed off of plans to let iPhones users have end-to-end encryption on their iCloud backups.
What's the difference between a real job and the horde of fake ones found on the internet? It's even more basic than the fact that one is fake - fake jobs are suspiciously easy to get interviews for.