Tag: sextortion
US healthcare crisis looms
The US healthcare sector is now reeling from a seemingly never-ending series of cyberattacks. The problem is becoming so dire that there is growing concern that it may even spark a genuine healthcare crisis. The recent ransomware attack on Kettering Health, for example, which operates 14 hospitals and over 120 medical facilities in Ohio, is merely the latest volley in a remorseless wave of cyberattacks on the cash-rich sector.
Sperm Bank Heist
Another cyber breach as potentially damaging as that of the infamous hook-up site for married users, Ashley Madison, 15 years ago has recently come to light that could have equally serious consequences. According to a notification filed this month with the California Department of Justice, the sperm bank California Cryobank reports a breach that occurred last April. Stolen files include the names, social security numbers, driver's license numbers, financial accounts, and health insurance information of many of the sperm bank donors and their recipients.
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.
Secret Service Hot on the Trail of Cybercriminal “Stalin”
The United States Secret Service is doubling down on the search for cybercriminal “Stalin.” On August 26, 2024, the U.S Department of State partnered with the US Secret Service to put out a bounty of up to $2.5 million for information leading to the arrest of Belarusian hacker Volodymyr Kadariya, sometimes going by the alias “Stalin.” Kadariya was allegedly part of a malicious advertising (“malvertising”) ring responsible for transmitting the Angler Exploit Kit, a toolkit utilized by threat actors to exploit vulnerabilities in a system or code.
Exclusive: Deepfakes being used to manipulate share prices
Cash-rich cybercriminals are learning that the easiest way to make money on the stock markets while laundering cash at the same time is to use deepfake videos to impact share prices, albeit temporarily. According to Tim Grieveson, Senior Vice President of Global Cyber Risk, BitSight: “Using video and audio deepfakes to manipulate share prices for financial gain is definitely happening, but is something no one is currently talking about.” “Using a deepfake to announce a takeover could, for instance, drive up a stock in which the threat actor owns shares. Alternatively, a negative announcement such as a dire profits warning could be used to lower the share price so that the threat actor could buy the shares at a knock-down price, only to sell them again when the profits warning was seen to be fake” adds Grieveson.
US Data Compromises Double Year-on-Year
It's official – the US is losing the battle against cybercrime. The first quarter of this year has seen 841 publicly reported data compromises - a 90 percent increase compared to 442 compromises in Q1 2023. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), the picture may be even grimmer than these bald statistics suggest. Year-on-year, the number of cyberattack-related data breach notices without information about the root cause of the attack leapt from 166 in Q1 2023 to 439 in Q1 2024. This represents a staggering rise of 265 percent in unsolved data breaches.
Sextortion racket triggers US youth suicides
Financial sextortion is now the most rapidly growing crime targeting American, Canadian, and Australian youth. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has called it: “a global crisis that demands everyone’s attention” - having observed a one thousand percent increase in financial sextortion incidents over the last 18 months. In a December 2023 hearing, FBI Director Wray warned Congress that sextortion is “a rapidly escalating threat,” and teenage victims “don’t know where to turn.” Almost all this activity is linked to West African cybercriminals known as the “Yahoo Boys”, who primarily target English-speaking minors and young adults on the online social networks: Instagram, Snapchat, and Wizz, according to the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) report, “A Digital Pandemic: Uncovering the role of ‘Yahoo Boys’ in the Surge of Social Media-enabled Financial Sextortion Targeting Minors.
AI revolutionizes sextortion scams
Artificial intelligence (AI) services are enabling unscrupulous online blackmailers to create fake but highly realistic sexually explicit photographs and videos of innocent victims. The blackmailer usually emails the target individual to show them pornographic images of themselves, threatening to send the pictures to the victim’s contacts – a process known as “sextortion.” A variation is to claim to have compromising images of the victim recorded via the webcam on their smartphone.
Sextortion scams soar by 178%
Security researchers, ESTET reports a 178% increase in sextortion emails between the first half of 2022 and the first six months of 2023, marking the category out as a top email threat. The company ranks sextortion emails third among all email threats in H1 2023.