Security News
An analysis of the mobile threat landscape in 2022 shows that Spain and Turkey are the most targeted countries for malware campaigns, even as a mix of new and existing banking trojans are increasingly targeting Android devices to conduct on-device fraud. "Just in the first five months of 2022 there has been an increase of more than 40% in malware families that abuse Android OS to perform fraud using the device itself, making it almost impossible to detect them using traditional fraud scoring engines."
Bad bots are often the first indicator of online fraud and represent a risk to digital businesses, as well as their customers. In 2021, evasive bad bots - a grouping of moderate and advanced bad bots that elude standard security defenses - made up 65.6% of all bad bot traffic.
The US government has recovered over $15 million in proceeds from the 3ve digital advertising fraud operation that cost businesses more than $29 million for ads that were never viewed. The action, Peace added, "Sends a powerful message to those involved in cyber fraud that there are no boundaries to prosecuting these bad actors and locating their ill-gotten assets wherever they are in the world."
The US government has recovered over $15 million from Swiss bank accounts belonging to operators behind the '3ve' online advertising fraud scheme. 84 to the US government as part of a Final Order of Forfeiture related to United States v. Sergey Ovsyannikov, one of the conspirators in the global ad fraud campaign.
Noting that banking fraud continues to rise, the data-driven research study found a 41% increase in attempted fraud over a similar evaluation conducted the year before by its data scientists. Data scientists and fraud subject matter experts compiled anonymized data secured from a subset of its total monitored transactions, including both online and offline payments channels that covered ACH, wires, checks, card purchases, and P2P transactions.
Visa has invested $9 billion over a five-year period to fund new fraud and security initiatives that include multi-layered cybersecurity, AI and analytics to further secure digital transactions. One service, Visa's flagship predictive analytics product Advanced Authorization, prevented an estimated $26 billion in fraud in 2021, according to Michael Jabbara, vice president and global head of fraud at Visa, in a recent interview with TechRepublic.
China's Ministry of Public Security has revealed the five most prevalent types of fraud perpetrated online or by phone. The e-commerce scam known as "Brushing" topped the list and accounted for around a third of all internet fraud activity in China.
Many of the victimized entities were U.S.-based financial institutions and brokerage firms that suffered direct system compromise from Mustapha and his co-conspirators, who performed unauthorized transactions using other peoples' brokerage accounts. "The defendant was part of a nefarious group that caused millions of dollars in losses to victims by engaging in a litany of cybercrimes, including widespread hacking, fraud, taking control of victims' securities brokerage accounts, and trading in the name of the victims," stated U.S. Attorney Breon Peace.
FBI: $43 billion in losses are due to Business Email Compromise fraud between 2016 and 2021. The Federal Bureau of Investigation released an alert that said there has been a 65% increase in identified global exposed losses from Business Email Compromise fraud, also known as Email Account Compromise.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday announced that it will expand and rebrand its Cyber Unit to fight against cyber-related threats and protect investors in cryptocurrency markets. To that end, the SEC is renaming the Cyber Unit within the Division of Enforcement to Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit and plans to infuse 20 additional positions with the goal of investigating wrongdoing in the crypto markets.