Security News
After news broke late last week about Silicon Valley Bank's bank run and collapse, security researchers started warning SVB account holders about incoming SVB-related scams and phishing attempts. Proofpoint researchers flagged a campaign using messages supposedly coming from several cryptocurrency brands, trying to trick users into installing a Smart Contract that would transfer the contents of their wallet to the attacker's wallet.
A convincing Twitter scam is targeting bank customers by abusing the quote-tweet feature, as observed by BleepingComputer. Users tagging Twitter accounts of their banks in their tweets-for example, when raising complaints about an issue, should watch out for responses from non-verified Twitter accounts that may closely be impersonating the bank's support staff and instead be a scam.
Resecurity identified one of the largest investment fraud networks by size and volume of operations created to defraud Internet users from Australia, Canada, China, Colombia, European Union, India, Singapore, Malaysia, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, the U.S. and other regions. Modus operandi of the group was focused on investment options in non-existing products and investment plans supposedly offered by the Fortune 100 corporations and state-owned entities.
Newly released Federal Trade Commission data shows that consumers reported losing nearly $8.8 billion to fraud in 2022, an increase of more than 30 percent over the previous year. Consumers reported losing more money to investment scams - more than $3.8 billion-than any other category in 2022.
A Federal grand jury in the District of Oregon has indicted four Russian nationals founders of Forsage decentralized finance cryptocurrency investment platform for allegedly running a global Ponzi and pyramid scheme that raised $340 million. The defendants, Vladimir Okhotnikov, Olena Oblamska, Mikhail Sergeev, and Sergey Maskalov, face charges of running aggressive false advertisements on social media, pushing misleading investment and business opportunities related to Forsage to aspiring investors.
Popular cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase disclosed that it experienced a cybersecurity attack that targeted its employees. One employee is said to have fallen for the scam, who entered their username and password in a fake login page set up by the threat actors to harvest the credentials.
Having contacted Shams after reading his story in The Register, Hunter quickly learned that there are more victims out there. "Everything seemed to check out," Hunter told The Register.
In it, a pig butchering romance scammer targets her next victim: Sophos's lead threat researcher. "I was approached by multiple, separate scam operations personally, each running different variations on pig butchering," Sophos's principal threat researcher Sean Gallagher wrote in a blog post today about one of these attempts.
"Pig butchering" is the colorful name given to online cons that trick the victim into giving money to the scammer, thinking it is an investment opportunity. It's a rapidly growing area of fraud, and getting more sophisticated.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission says Americans once again reported record losses of $1.3 billion to romance scams in 2022, with median losses of $4,400. "Last year's romance scam numbers looked a lot like 2021 all over again, and it's not a pretty picture. In 2022, nearly 70,000 people reported a romance scam, and reported losses hit a staggering $1.3 billion," the FTC said.