Tag: darknet
Ransomware group offers cyber gangs legal advice
A new cybercriminal group, Qilin, is rapidly establishing dominance in the murky world of ransomware by providing not just ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) but a full soup-to-nuts cybercrime service .In addition to the malware, Qilin also provides a full suite of legal guidance for criminals together with operational and storage features. According cybersecurity company, Cybereason, Qilin is positioning itself not just as a ransomware group, but as a full cybercrime service.
Cybercrime forums span national boundaries
The bust of the illegal Cracked and Nulled crime forums evidences the global nature of cybercrime and the impossibility of seeing it as a threat that has no regard for national boundaries. Although at least 17 million US citizens were victims of the crime forums. law enforcement agencies in the United States, Romania, Australia, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Greece were all involved in the bust, according to the US Department of Justice.
FBI Takes Down Crypto-Laundering Scam
The line between cybercrime and plain old-fashioned fraud has become yet more blurred following the sentencing of international virtual currency vendor Anurag Pramod Murarka to 121 months in prison for his involvement in a classic money laundering operation that he advertised on Darknet marketplaces. According to recently unsealed court documents, Murarka operated an international money laundering business from April 2021 until September 29, 2023. Murarka was able to operate out of India and serviced shady clients in the United States through an intricate Indian “hawala” money transferring system and the use of the US Postal Service as his “unwitting partner in transferring ill-begotten funds.” The original Hawala scam was an Indian political and financial scandal involving illicit payments allegedly sent by politicians through a network of four Hawala brokers that implicated some of the country's leading politicians.
FBI reports record cybercrime losses in 2023
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation reports that last year the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received a record number of complaints, with potential losses exceeding $12.5 billion. Although the figures for 2023 represent a 10 percent increase over 2022 and a 22 percent rise in losses suffered, the FBI fears that even this only represents the tip of a vast unseen iceberg of cybercrime. The report quotes the FBI’s recent infiltration of the Hive ransomware group, which discovered that only 20 percent of victims had reported the incidents to law enforcement authorities.