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It’s not often that a zero-day vulnerability causes a network security vendor to urge customers to physically remove and decommission an entire line of affected hardware — as opposed to just applying software updates. But experts say that is exactly what transpired this week with Barracuda Networks, as the company struggled to combat a sprawling malware threat which appears to have undermined its email security appliances in such a fundamental way that they can no longer be safely updated with software fixes.
The Barracuda Email Security Gateway (ESG) 900 appliance.
Campbell, Calif. based Barracuda said it hired incident response firm Mandiant on May 18 after receiving reports about unusual traffic originating from its Email Security Gateway (ESG) devices, which are designed to sit at the edge of an organization’s network and scan all incoming and outgoing email for malware.
On May 19, Barracuda identified that the malicious traffic was taking advantage of a previously unknown vulnerability in its ESG appliances, and on May 20 the company pushed a patch for the flaw to all affected appliances (CVE-2023-2868).
In its security advisory, Barracuda said the vulnerability existed in the Barracuda software component responsible for screening attachments for malware. More alarmingly, the company said it appears attackers first started exploiting the flaw in October 2022.
But on June 6, Barracuda suddenly began urging its ESG customers to wholesale rip out and replace — not patch — affected appliances.
“Impacted ESG appliances must be immediately replaced regardless of patch version level,” the company’s advisory warned. “Barracuda’s recommendation at this time is full replacement of the impacted ESG.”
In a statement, Barracuda said it will be providing the replacement product to impacted customers at no cost, and that not all ESG appliances were compromised.
“No other Barracuda product, including our SaaS email solutions, were impacted by this vulnerability,” the company said. “If an ESG appliance is displaying a notification in the User Interface, the ESG appliance had indicators of compromise. If no notification is displayed, we have no reason to believe that the appliance has been compromised at this time.”
Nevertheless, the statement says that “out of an abundance of caution and in furtherance of our containment strategy, we recommend impacted customers replace their compromised appliance.”
“As of June 8, 2023, approximately 5% of active ESG appliances worldwide have shown any evidence of known indicators of compromise due to the vulnerability,” the statement continues. “Despite deployment of additional patches based on known IOCs, we continue to see evidence of ongoing malware activity on a subset of the compromised appliances. Therefore, we would like customers to replace any compromised appliance with a new unaffected device.”
Rapid7‘s Caitlin Condon called this remarkable turn of events “fairly stunning,” and said there appear to be roughly 11,000 vulnerable ESG devices still connected to the Internet worldwide.
“The pivot from patch to total replacement of affected devices is fairly stunning and implies the malware the threat actors deployed somehow achieves persistence at a low enough level that even wiping the device wouldn’t eradicate attacker access,” Condon wrote.
Barracuda said the malware was identified on a subset of appliances that allowed the attackers persistent backdoor access to the devices, and that evidence of data exfiltration was identified on some systems.
Rapid7 said it has seen no evidence that attackers are using the flaw to move laterally within victim networks. But that may be small consolation for Barracuda customers now coming to terms with the notion that foreign cyberspies probably have been hoovering up all their email for months.
Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at University of California, Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), said it is likely that the malware was able to corrupt the underlying firmware that powers the ESG devices in some irreparable way.
“One of the goals of malware is to be hard to remove, and this suggests the malware compromised the firmware itself to make it really hard to remove and really stealthy,” Weaver said. “That’s not a ransomware actor, that’s a state actor. Why? Because a ransomware actor doesn’t care about that level of access. They don’t need it. If they’re going for data extortion, it’s more like a smash-and-grab. If they’re going for data ransoming, they’re encrypting the data itself — not the machines.”
In addition to replacing devices, Barracuda says ESG customers should also rotate any credentials connected to the appliance(s), and check for signs of compromise dating back to at least October 2022 using the network and endpoint indicators the company has released publicly.
Update, June 9, 11:55 a.m. ET: Barracuda has issued an updated statement about the incident, portions of which are now excerpted above.
Code-signing certificates are supposed to help authenticate the identity of software publishers, and provide cryptographic assurance that a signed piece of software has not been altered or tampered with. Both of these qualities make stolen or ill-gotten code-signing certificates attractive to cybercriminal groups, who prize their ability to add stealth and longevity to malicious software. This post is a deep dive on “Megatraffer,” a veteran Russian hacker who has practically cornered the underground market for malware focused code-signing certificates since 2015.
One of Megatraffer’s ads on an English-language cybercrime forum.
A review of Megatraffer’s posts on Russian crime forums shows this user began peddling individual stolen code-signing certs in 2015 on the Russian-language forum Exploit, and soon expanded to selling certificates for cryptographically signing applications and files designed to run in Microsoft Windows, Java, Adobe AIR, Mac and Microsoft Office.
Megatraffer explained that malware purveyors need a certificate because many antivirus products will be far more interested in unsigned software, and because signed files downloaded from the Internet don’t tend to get blocked by security features built into modern web browsers. Additionally, newer versions of Microsoft Windows will complain with a bright yellow or red alert message if users try to install a program that is not signed.
“Why do I need a certificate?” Megatraffer asked rhetorically in their Jan. 2016 sales thread on Exploit. “Antivirus software trusts signed programs more. For some types of software, a digital signature is mandatory.”
At the time, Megatraffer was selling unique code-signing certificates for $700 apiece, and charging more than twice that amount ($1,900) for an “extended validation” or EV code-signing cert, which is supposed to only come with additional identity vetting of the certificate holder. According to Megatraffer, EV certificates were a “must-have” if you wanted to sign malicious software or hardware drivers that would reliably work in newer Windows operating systems.
Part of Megatraffer’s ad. Image: Ke-la.com.
Megatraffer has continued to offer their code-signing services across more than a half-dozen other Russian-language cybercrime forums, mostly in the form of sporadically available EV and non-EV code-signing certificates from major vendors like Thawte and Comodo.
More recently, it appears Megatraffer has been working with ransomware groups to help improve the stealth of their malware. Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, someone leaked several years of internal chat logs from the Conti ransomware gang, and those logs show Megatraffer was working with the group to help code-sign their malware between July and October 2020.
According to cyber intelligence firm Intel 471, Megatraffer has been active on more than a half-dozen crime forums from September 2009 to the present day. And on most of these identities, Megatraffer has used the email address 774748@gmail.com. That same email address also is tied to two forum accounts for a user with the handle “O.R.Z.”
Constella Intelligence, a company that tracks exposed databases, finds that 774748@gmail.com was used in connection with just a handful of passwords, but most frequently the password “featar24“. Pivoting off of that password reveals a handful of email addresses, including akafitis@gmail.com.
Intel 471 shows akafitis@gmail.com was used to register another O.R.Z. user account — this one on Verified[.]ru in 2008. Prior to that, akafitis@gmail.com was used as the email address for the account “Fitis,” which was active on Exploit between September 2006 and May 2007. Constella found the password “featar24” also was used in conjunction with the email address spampage@yandex.ru, which is tied to yet another O.R.Z. account on Carder[.]su from 2008.
The email address akafitis@gmail.com was used to create a Livejournal blog profile named Fitis that has a large bear as its avatar. In November 2009, Fitis wrote, “I am the perfect criminal. My fingerprints change beyond recognition every few days. At least my laptop is sure of it.”
Fitis’s Livejournal account. Image: Archive.org.
Fitis’s real-life identity was exposed in 2010 after two of the biggest sponsors of pharmaceutical spam went to war with each other, and large volumes of internal documents, emails and chat records seized from both spam empires were leaked to this author. That protracted and public conflict formed the backdrop of my 2014 book — “Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime, from Global Epidemic to Your Front Door.”
One of the leaked documents included a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet containing the real names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, street addresses and WebMoney addresses for dozens of top earners in Spamit — at the time the most successful pharmaceutical spam affiliate program in the Russian hacking scene and one that employed most of the top Russian botmasters.
That document shows Fitis was one of Spamit’s most prolific recruiters, bringing more than 75 affiliates to the Spamit program over several years prior to its implosion in 2010 (and earning commissions on any future sales from all 75 affiliates).
The document also says Fitis got paid using a WebMoney account that was created when its owner presented a valid Russian passport for a Konstantin Evgenievich Fetisov, born Nov. 16, 1982 and residing in Moscow. Russian motor vehicle records show two different vehicles are registered to this person at the same Moscow address.
The most interesting domain name registered to the email address spampage@yahoo.com, fittingly enough, is fitis[.]ru, which DomainTools.com says was registered in 2005 to a Konstantin E. Fetisov from Moscow.
The Wayback Machine at archive.org has a handful of mostly blank pages indexed for fitis[.]ru in its early years, but for a brief period in 2007 it appears this website was inadvertently exposing all of its file directories to the Internet.
One of the exposed files — Glavmed.html — is a general invitation to the infamous Glavmed pharmacy affiliate program, a now-defunct scheme that paid tens of millions of dollars to affiliates who advertised online pill shops mainly by hacking websites and manipulating search engine results. Glavmed was operated by the same Russian cybercriminals who ran the Spamit program.
A Google translated ad circa 2007 recruiting for the pharmacy affiliate program Glavmed, which told interested applicants to contact the ICQ number used by Fitis, a.k.a. MegaTraffer. Image: Archive.org.
Archive.org shows the fitis[.]ru webpage with the Glavmed invitation was continuously updated with new invite codes. In their message to would-be Glavmed affiliates, the program administrator asked applicants to contact them at the ICQ number 165540027, which Intel 471 found was an instant messenger address previously used by Fitis on Exploit.
The exposed files in the archived version of fitis[.]ru include source code for malicious software, lists of compromised websites used for pharmacy spam, and a handful of what are apparently personal files and photos. Among the photos is a 2007 image labeled merely “fitis.jpg,” which shows a bespectacled, bearded young man with a ponytail standing next to what appears to be a newly-married couple at a wedding ceremony.
Mr. Fetisov did not respond to requests for comment.
As a veteran organizer of affiliate programs, Fitis did not waste much time building a new moneymaking collective after Spamit closed up shop. New York City-based cyber intelligence firm Flashpoint found that Megatraffer’s ICQ was the contact number for Himba[.]ru, a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) program launched in 2012 that paid handsomely for completed application forms tied to a variety of financial instruments, including consumer credit cards, insurance policies, and loans.
“Megatraffer’s entrenched presence on cybercrime forums strongly suggests that malicious means are used to source at least a portion of traffic delivered to HIMBA’s advertisers,” Flashpoint observed in a threat report on the actor.
Intel 471 finds that Himba was an active affiliate program until around May 2019, when it stopping paying its associates.
Fitis’s Himba affiliate program, circa February 2014. Image: Archive.org.
Flashpoint notes that in September 2015, Megatraffer posted a job ad on Exploit seeking experienced coders to work on browser plugins, installers and “loaders” — basically remote access trojans (RATs) that establish communication between the attacker and a compromised system.
“The actor specified that he is looking for full-time, onsite help either in his Moscow or Kiev locations,” Flashpoint wrote.
Social networks are constantly battling inauthentic bot accounts that send direct messages to users promoting scam cryptocurrency investment platforms. What follows is an interview with a Russian hacker responsible for a series of aggressive crypto spam campaigns that recently prompted several large Mastodon communities to temporarily halt new registrations. According to the hacker, their spam software has been in private use until the last few weeks, when it was released as open source code.
Renaud Chaput is a freelance programmer working on modernizing and scaling the Mastodon project infrastructure — including joinmastodon.org, mastodon.online, and mastodon.social. Chaput said that on May 4, 2023, someone unleashed a spam torrent targeting users on these Mastodon communities via “private mentions,” a kind of direct messaging on the platform.
The messages said recipients had earned an investment credit at a cryptocurrency trading platform called moonxtrade[.]com. Chaput said the spammers used more than 1,500 Internet addresses across 400 providers to register new accounts, which then followed popular accounts on Mastodon and sent private mentions to the followers of those accounts.
Since then, the same spammers have used this method to advertise more than 100 different crypto investment-themed domains. Chaput said that at one point this month the volume of bot accounts being registered for the crypto spam campaign started overwhelming the servers that handle new signups at Mastodon.social.
“We suddenly went from like three registrations per minute to 900 a minute,” Chaput said. “There was nothing in the Mastodon software to detect that activity, and the protocol is not designed to handle this.”
One of the crypto investment scam messages promoted in the spam campaigns on Mastodon this month.
Seeking to gain a temporary handle on the spam wave, Chaput said he briefly disabled new account registrations on mastodon.social and mastondon.online. Shortly after that, those same servers came under a sustained distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
Chaput said whoever was behind the DDoS was definitely not using point-and-click DDoS tools, like a booter or stresser service.
“This was three hours non-stop, 200,000 to 400,000 requests per second,” Chaput said of the DDoS. “At first, they were targeting one path, and when we blocked that they started to randomize things. Over three hours the attack evolved several times.”
Chaput says the spam waves have died down since they retrofitted mastodon.social with a CAPTCHA, those squiggly letter and number combinations designed to stymie automated account creation tools. But he’s worried that other Mastodon instances may not be as well-staffed and might be easy prey for these spammers.
“We don’t know if this is the work of one person, or if this is [related to] software or services being sold to others,” Chaput told KrebsOnSecurity. “We’re really impressed by the scale of it — using hundreds of domains and thousands of Microsoft email addresses.”
Chaput said a review of their logs indicates many of the newly registered Mastodon spam accounts were registered using the same 0auth credentials, and that a domain common to those credentials was quot[.]pw.
The domain quot[.]pw has been registered and abandoned by several parties since 2014, but the most recent registration data available through DomainTools.com shows it was registered in March 2020 to someone in Krasnodar, Russia with the email address edgard011012@gmail.com.
This email address is also connected to accounts on several Russian cybercrime forums, including “__edman__,” who had a history of selling “logs” — large amounts of data stolen from many bot-infected computers — as well as giving away access to hacked Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
In September 2018, a user by the name “ципа” (phonetically “Zipper” in Russian) registered on the Russian hacking forum Lolzteam using the edgard0111012@gmail.com address. In May 2020, Zipper told another Lolzteam member that quot[.]pw was their domain. That user advertised a service called “Quot Project” which said they could be hired to write programming scripts in Python and C++.
“I make Telegram bots and other rubbish cheaply,” reads one February 2020 sales thread from Zipper.
Quotpw/Ahick/Edgard/ципа advertising his coding services in this Google-translated forum posting.
Clicking the “open chat in Telegram” button on Zipper’s Lolzteam profile page launched a Telegram instant message chat window where the user Quotpw responded almost immediately. Asked if they were aware their domain was being used to manage a spam botnet that was pelting Mastodon instances with crypto scam spam, Quotpw confirmed the spam was powered by their software.
“It was made for a limited circle of people,” Quotpw said, noting that they recently released the bot software as open source on GitHub.
Quotpw went on to say the spam botnet was powered by well more than the hundreds of IP addresses tracked by Chaput, and that these systems were mostly residential proxies. A residential proxy generally refers to a computer or mobile device running some type of software that enables the system to be used as a pass-through for Internet traffic from others.
Very often, this proxy software is installed surreptitiously, such as through a “Free VPN” service or mobile app. Residential proxies also can refer to households protected by compromised home routers running factory-default credentials or outdated firmware.
Quotpw maintains they have earned more than $2,000 sending roughly 100,000 private mentions to users of different Mastodon communities over the past few weeks. Quotpw said their conversion rate for the same bot-powered direct message spam on Twitter is usually much higher and more profitable, although they conceded that recent adjustments to Twitter’s anti-bot CAPTCHA have put a crimp in their Twitter earnings.
“My partners (I’m programmer) lost time and money while ArkoseLabs (funcaptcha) introduced new precautions on Twitter,” Quotpw wrote in a Telegram reply. “On Twitter, more spam and crypto scam.”
Asked whether they felt at all conflicted about spamming people with invitations to cryptocurrency scams, Quotpw said in their hometown “they pay more for such work than in ‘white’ jobs” — referring to legitimate programming jobs that don’t involve malware, botnets, spams and scams.
“Consider salaries in Russia,” Quotpw said. “Any spam is made for profit and brings illegal money to spammers.”
Shortly after edgard011012@gmail.com registered quot[.]pw, the WHOIS registration records for the domain were changed again, to msr-sergey2015@yandex.ru, and to a phone number in Austria: +43.6607003748.
Constella Intelligence, a company that tracks breached data, finds that the address msr-sergey2015@yandex.ru has been associated with accounts at the mobile app site aptoide.com (user: CoolappsforAndroid) and vimeworld.ru that were created from different Internet addresses in Vienna, Austria.
A search in Skype on that Austrian phone number shows it belongs to a Sergey Proshutinskiy who lists his location as Vienna, Austria. The very first result that comes up when one searches that unusual name in Google is a LinkedIn profile for a Sergey Proshutinskiy from Vienna, Austria.
Proshutinskiy’s LinkedIn profile says he is a Class of 2024 student at TGM, which is a state-owned, technical and engineering school in Austria. His resume also says he is a data science intern at Mondi Group, an Austrian manufacturer of sustainable packaging and paper.
Mr. Proshutinskiy did not respond to requests for comment.
Quotpw denied being Sergey, and said Sergey was a friend who registered the domain as a birthday present and favor last year.
“Initially, I bought it for 300 rubles,” Quotpw explained. “The extension cost 1300 rubles (expensive). I waited until it expired and forgot to buy it. After that, a friend (Sergey) bought [the] domain and transferred access rights to me.”
“He’s not even an information security specialist,” Quotpw said of Sergey. “My friends do not belong to this field. None of my friends are engaged in scams or other black [hat] activities.”
It may seem unlikely that someone would go to all this trouble to spam Mastodon users over several weeks using an impressive number of resources — all for just $2,000 in profit. But it is likely that whoever is actually running the various crypto scam platforms advertised by Quotpw’s spam messages pays handsomely for any investments generated by their spam.
According to the FBI, financial losses from cryptocurrency investment scams dwarfed losses for all other types of cybercrime in 2022, rising from $907 million in 2021 to $2.57 billion last year.
Update, May 25, 10:30 a.m.: Corrected attribution of the Austrian school TGM.
A sprawling online company based in Georgia that has made tens of millions of dollars purporting to sell access to jobs at the United States Postal Service (USPS) has exposed its internal IT operations and database of nearly 900,000 customers. The leaked records indicate the network’s chief technology officer in Pakistan has been hacked for the past year, and that the entire operation was created by the principals of a Tennessee-based telemarketing firm that has promoted USPS employment websites since 2016.
The website FederalJobsCenter promises to get you a job at the USPS in 30 days or your money back.
KrebsOnSecurity was recently contacted by a security researcher who said he found a huge tranche of full credit card records exposed online, and that at first glance the domain names involved appeared to be affiliated with the USPS.
Further investigation revealed a long-running international operation that has been emailing and text messaging people for years to sign up at a slew of websites that all promise they can help visitors secure employment at the USPS.
Sites like FederalJobsCenter[.]com also show up prominently in Google search results for USPS employment, and steer applicants toward making credit card “registration deposits” to ensure that one’s application for employment is reviewed. These sites also sell training, supposedly to help ace an interview with USPS human resources.
FederalJobsCenter’s website is full of content that makes it appear the site is affiliated with the USPS, although its “terms and conditions” state that it is not. Rather, the terms state that FederalJobsCenter is affiliated with an entity called US Job Services, which says it is based in Lawrenceville, Ga.
“US Job Services provides guidance, coaching, and live assistance to postal job candidates to help them perform better in each of the steps,” the website explains.
The site says applicants need to make a credit card deposit to register, and that this amount is refundable if the applicant is not offered a USPS job within 30 days after the interview process.
But a review of the public feedback on US Job Services and dozens of similar names connected to this entity over the years shows a pattern of activity: Applicants pay between $39.99 and $100 for USPS job coaching services, and receive little if anything in return. Some reported being charged the same amount monthly.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has sued several times over the years to disrupt various schemes offering to help people get jobs at the Postal Service. Way back in 1998, the FTC and the USPS took action against several organizations that were selling test or interview preparation services for potential USPS employees.
“Companies promising jobs with the U.S. Postal Service are breaking federal law,” the joint USPS-FTC statement said.
In that 1998 case, the defendants behind the scheme were taking out classified ads in newspapers. Ditto for a case the FTC brought in 2005. By 2008, the USPS job exam preppers had shifted to advertising their schemes mostly online. And in 2013, the FTC won a nearly $5 million judgment against a Kentucky company purporting to offer such services.
Tim McKinlay authored a report last year at Affiliateunguru.com on whether the US Job Services website job-postal[.]com was legitimate or a scam. He concluded it was a scam based on several factors, including that the website listed multiple other names (suggesting it had recently switched names), and that he got nothing from the transaction with the job site.
“They openly admit they’re not affiliated with the US Postal Service, but claim to be experts in the field, and that, just by following the steps on their site, you easily pass the postal exams and get a job in no time,” McKinlay wrote. “But it’s really just a smoke and mirrors game. The site’s true purpose is to collect $46.95 from as many people as possible. And considering how popular this job is, they’re probably making a killing.”
KrebsOnSecurity was alerted to the data exposure by Patrick Barry, chief information officer at Charlotte, NC based Rebyc Security. Barry said he found that not only was US Job Services leaking its customer payment records in real-time and going back to 2016, but its website also leaked a log file from 2019 containing the site administrator’s contact information and credentials to the site’s back-end database.
Barry shared screenshots of that back-end database, which show the email address for the administrator of US Job Services is tab.webcoder@gmail.com. According to cyber intelligence platform Constella Intelligence, that email address is tied to the LinkedIn profile for a developer in Karachi, Pakistan named Muhammed Tabish Mirza.
A search on tab.webcoder@gmail.com at DomainTools.com reveals that email address was used to register several USPS-themed domains, including postal2017[.]com, postaljobscenter[.]com and usps-jobs[.]com.
Mr. Mirza declined to respond to questions, but the exposed database information was removed from the Internet almost immediately after KrebsOnSecurity shared the offending links.
A “Campaigns” tab on that web panel listed several advertising initiatives tied to US Job Services websites, with names like “walmart drip campaign,” “hiring activity due to virus,” “opt-in job alert SMS,” and “postal job opening.”
Another page on the US Job Services panel included a script for upselling people who call in response to email and text message solicitations, with an add-on program that normally sells for $1,200 but is being “practically given away” for a limited time, for just $49.
An upselling tutorial for call center employees.
“There’s something else we have you can take advantage of that can help you make more money,” the script volunteers. “It’s an easy to use 12-month career development plan and program to follow that will result in you getting any job you want, not just at the post office….anywhere…and then getting promoted rapidly.”
It’s bad enough that US Job Services was leaking customer data: Constella Intelligence says the email address tied to Mr. Mirza shows up in more than a year’s worth of “bot logs” created by a malware infection from the Redline infostealer.
Constella reports that for roughly a year between 2021 and 2022, a Microsoft Windows device regularly used by Mr. Mirza and his colleagues was actively uploading all of the device’s usernames, passwords and authentication cookies to cybercriminals based in Russia.
The web-based backend for US Job Services lists more than 160 people under its “Users & Teams” tab. This page indicates that access to the consumer and payment data collected by US Job Services is currently granted to several other coders who work with Mr. Mirza in Pakistan, and to multiple executives, contractors and employees working for a call center in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
The call center — which operates as Nextlevelsupportcenters[.]com and thenextlevelsupport[.]com — curiously has several key associates with a history of registering USPS jobs-related domain names.
The US Job Services website has more than 160 users, including most of the employees at Next Level Support.
The website for NextLevelSupport says it was founded in 2017 by a Gary Plott, whose LinkedIn profile describes him as a seasoned telecommunications industry expert. The leaked backend database for US Job Services says Plott is a current administrator on the system, along with several other Nextlevel founders listed on the company’s site.
Reached via telephone, Plott initially said his company was merely a “white label” call center that multiple clients use to interact with customers, and that the content their call center is responsible for selling on behalf of US Job Services was not produced by NextLevelSupport.
“A few years ago, we started providing support for this postal product,” Plott said. “We didn’t develop the content but agreed we would support it.”
Interestingly, DomainTools says the Gmail address used by Plott in the US Jobs system was also used to register multiple USPS job-related domains, including postaljobssite[.]com, postalwebsite[.]com, usps-nlf[.]com, usps-nla[.]com.
Asked to reconcile this with his previous statement, Plott said he never did anything with those sites but acknowledged that his company did decide to focus on the US Postal jobs market from the very beginning.
Plott said his company never refuses to issue a money-back request from a customer, because doing so would result in costly chargebacks for NextLevel (and presumably for the many credit card merchant accounts apparently set up by Mr. Mirza).
“We’ve never been deceptive,” Plott said, noting that customers of the US Job Services product receive a digital download with tips on how to handle a USPS interview, as well as unlimited free telephone support if they need it.
“We’ve never told anyone we were the US Postal Service,” Plott continued. “We make sure people fully understand that they are not required to buy this product, but we think we can help you and we have testimonials from people we have helped. But ultimately you as the customer make that decision.”
An email address in the US Job Services teams page for another user — Stephanie Dayton — was used to register the domains postalhiringreview[.]com, and postalhiringreviewboard[.]org back in 2014. Reached for comment, Ms. Dayton said she has provided assistance to Next Level Support Centers with their training and advertising, but never in the capacity as an employee.
Perhaps the most central NextLevel associate who had access to US Job Services was Russell Ramage, a telemarketer from Warner Robins, Georgia. Ramage is listed in South Carolina incorporation records as the owner of a now-defunct call center service called Smart Logistics, a company whose name appears in the website registration records for several early and long-running US Job Services sites.
According to the state of Georgia, Russell Ramage was the registered agent of several USPS job-themed companies.
The leaked records show the email address used by Ramage also registered multiple USPS jobs-related domains, including postalhiringcenter[.]com, postalhiringreviews[.]com, postaljobs-email[.]com, and postaljobssupport1[.]com.
A review of business incorporation records in Georgia indicate Ramage was the registered agent for at least three USPS-related companies over the years, including Postal Career Placement LLC, Postal Job Services Inc., and Postal Operations Inc. All three companies were founded in 2015, and are now dissolved.
An obituary dated February 2023 says Russell Ramage recently passed away at the age of 41. No cause of death was stated, but the obituary goes on to say that Russ “Rusty” Ramage was “preceded in death by his mother, Anita Lord Ramage, pets, Raine and Nola and close friends, Nicole Reeves and Ryan Rawls.”
In 2014, then 33-year-old Ryan “Jootgater” Rawls of Alpharetta, Georgia pleaded guilty to conspiring to distribute controlled substances. Rawls also grew up in Warner Robins, and was one of eight suspects charged with operating a secret darknet narcotics ring called the Farmer’s Market, which federal prosecutors said trafficked in millions of dollars worth of controlled substances.
Reuters reported that an eighth suspect in that case had died by the time of Rawls’ 2014 guilty plea, although prosecutors declined to offer further details about that. According to his obituary, Ryan Christopher Rawls died at the age of 38 on Jan. 28, 2019.
In a comment on Ramage’s memorial wall, Stephanie Dayton said she began working with Ramage in 2006.
“Our friendship far surpassed a working one, we had a very close bond and became like brother and sister,” Dayton wrote. “I loved Russ deeply and he was like family. He was truly one of the best human beings I have ever known. He was kind and sweet and truly cared about others. Never met anyone like him. He will be truly missed. RIP brother.”
The FTC and USPS note that while applicants for many entry-level postal jobs are required to take a free postal exam, the tests are usually offered only every few years in any particular district, and there are no job placement guarantees based on score.
“If applicants pass the test by scoring at least 70 out of 100, they are placed on a register, ranked by their score,” the FTC explained. “When a position becomes open, the local post office looks to the applicable register for that geographic location and calls the top three applicants. The score is only one of many criteria taken into account for employment. The exams test general aptitude, something that cannot necessarily be increased by studying.”
The FTC says anyone interested in a job at the USPS should inquire at their local postal office, where applicants generally receive a free packet of information about required exams. More information about job opportunities at the postal service is available at the USPS’s careers website.
Michael Martel, spokesperson for the United States Postal Inspection Service, said in a written statement that the USPS has no affiliation with the websites or companies named in this story.
“To learn more about employment with USPS, visit USPS.com/careers,” Martel wrote. “If you are the victim of a crime online report it to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) at www.ic3.gov. To report fraud committed through or toward the USPS, its employees, or customers, report it to the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) at www.uspis.gov/report.”
According to the leaked back-end server for US Job Services, here is a list of the current sites selling this product:
usjobshelpcenter[.]com
usjobhelpcenter[.]com
job-postal[.]com
localpostalhiring[.]com
uspostalrecruitment[.]com
postalworkerjob[.]com
next-level-now[.]com
postalhiringcenters[.]com
postofficehiring[.]com
postaljobsplacement[.]com
postal-placement[.]com
postofficejobopenings[.]com
postalexamprep[.]com
postaljobssite[.]com
postalwebsite[.]com
postalcareerscenters[.]com
postal-hiring[.]com
postal-careers[.]com
postal-guide[.]com
postal-hiring-guide[.]com
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Imagine this: Your CEO sends you an email asking for your help transferring $5,000 to a new vendor for an urgent project. You make the transfer, only to find out later that the email was actually from an imposter, and that money is now in the hands of cybercriminals. Oops, right? crickets
Business Email Compromise (BEC) is a type of cybercrime that involves compromising or imitating legitimate business email accounts to carry out fraudulent transactions or steal sensitive information. The goal of a BEC attack is typically to trick the victim into transferring money, clicking on a malicious link, or disclosing sensitive information such as login credentials. BEC attacks can have a devastating impact on organizations of all sizes and in all industries, making it essential for businesses to be aware of the threat, understand the business risk, and take the necessary steps to protect themselves.
According to the latest FBI IC3 report, BEC is “one of the most financially damaging online crimes” and in 2021 was accountable for $2.4 Billion in adjusted losses for businesses and consumers.
One of the most common types of BEC attacks is called impersonating or email spoofing. By pretending to be a trusted colleague or business partner to gain the victim’s trust, the attacker uses social engineering techniques to trick the victim into clicking on a link or attachment in an email that contains malware, takes the victim to a malicious website, and has them transfer funds or change payment information.
BEC attacks can be very sophisticated and are difficult to detect. Many times, what the end-user sees on their email client does not represent the true email address of that sender, or it shows one that has been spoofed.
Typically, the attacker tries to impersonate someone in the organization with enough authority to not be questioned about what he/she is asking to be done.
As with everything in security, to be able to succeed in stopping BEC attacks, additional security layers & techniques should be implemented. There are several options to mitigate or reduce the number of successful BEC attacks. Creating a list of the people who will be likely to be impersonated will provide the best results. Usually, with names from the CxO level, this is known as a High Impact Personnel list. It will be used along with other security analysis engines to make sure any impersonated/spoof emails, along with other threats, get stopped and will not reach the end user.
The Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense solution leverages hundreds of detection engines that utilize state-of-the-art artificial intelligence/machine learning and natural language processing to convict messages from the most creative attackers! On top of this, our customers can define their High Impact Personnel list, and together with the other detection engines, will be able to not only block malicious messages but also understand the reasons and categories of why a message is being convicted as malicious.
In summary, Business Email Compromise (BEC) is a serious threat to organizations of all sizes and in all industries. To protect against BEC attacks, businesses should implement multiple techniques including identifying their High Impact Personnel for their organization, educating employees about the threat, and relying on reporting to understand who is being targeted most frequently so their security policies can be adjusted.
See how Secure Email Threat Defense identifies specific business risk factors to protect your organization.
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Attackers specifically craft business email compromise (BEC) and phishing emails using a combination of malicious techniques, expertly selected from an ever-evolving bag of tricks. They’ll use these techniques to impersonate a person or business that’s well-known to the targeted recipient and hide their true intentions, while attempting to avoid detection by security controls.
As a result of the requisite expertise needed to combat these complex attacks, email security has traditionally been siloed away in disparate teams and security controls. Practitioners are buried under an ever-growing pile of RFCs, requiring extensive domain-specific knowledge, unending vigilance, and meticulous manual interventions, such as tweaking trust levels and cultivating allow/block lists with IPs, domains, senders, and vendors.
Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense is leading the industry forward with a major shift, elevating email security into a new era; where administration will consist of merely associating specific business risks with the appropriate due diligence response required to remediate against them.
Email Threat Defense has introduced a new Threat Profile that provides the customer with deep insights into the specific business risks of individual email threats and the confidence to act quickly. This new visualization is powered by a new patent-pending threat detection engine. This engine leverages intelligence distilled from Talos global-scale threat research across a massive volume of email traffic into machine learning, behavioral modeling, and natural language understanding.
The detection engine granularly identifies specific underlying threat techniques utilized in the message by the attacker. The identified techniques provide the full context of the threat message as the supporting foundation for the engine to determine threat categorization and the specific risk to the business. These malicious Techniques, together with the threat category and specific business risk, are used to populate the Threat Profile.
Each message’s Threat Profile is identified in real-time, automatically remediated per policy, and surfaced directly to the operator in the message detail views, providing deep contextual insights into the attacker’s intent and the associated risks to the business. As part of a larger Extended Detection and Response (XDR) strategy, the actionable intelligence in Email Threat Defense is integrated with the wider enterprise orchestration of security controls via SecureX, easing the operational burden by decreasing your mean time to remediation (MTTR).
Email Threat Defense delivers a distinct understanding of malicious messages, the most vulnerable targets within the organization, and the most effective means of protecting them from phishing, scams, and BEC attacks. With a clean design and core focus on simplifying administration, Email Threat Defense deploys in minutes to strengthen protection of your existing Microsoft 365 Exchange Online platform against the most advanced email threats.
For more information, visit the Cisco Secure Email product pages, read the Email Threat Defense data sheet, and view the demo video below.
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Payment applications make splitting restaurant bills, taxi fares, and household expenses so much easier. Without having to tally totals at the table or fumble with crumpled bills, you and your companions can spend less stress and more time on the fun at hand.
There are various payment apps available, and the company that may first come to mind is PayPal. PayPal is regarded as a safe platform where security and strong encryption are a priority; however, a recent and advanced phishing scam is putting PayPal users at risk of giving up large sums of money and their personally identifiable information (PII).1
Let’s look at this “triple-pronged” PayPal phishing scam and review some tips to help you identify and proceed should you encounter it.
The typical part of this three-sided scam is the phishing email component. According to one source, the phishing email comes from a legitimate-looking PayPal service email address. Luckily, the typos, odd punctuation, extra spaces, and grammar errors in the body of the email give away that it is a phishing attempt. Remember, phishing emails are often worded poorly or have errors. Large companies, especially ones like PayPal, have teams of content experts vetting all automated messages for such mistakes, so several mistakes in an email should set off your alarm bells. Proceed with caution and do not click on any links in the message.
The email also included wording that encouraged the user to act quickly or be charged a lot of money. That’s another trademark of phishing emails: urgency. Take a deep breath and make sure to reread carefully all emails that “require” a quick response. Don’t be scared by dire consequences. Phishers rely on people to rush and not give themselves time to listen to their better judgement.
The PayPal phishing email included a support phone number that claimed it was toll free. In actuality, it was an international phone number. So, if the recipient of the phishing email didn’t quite believe the message but wanted to follow up, the scam could catch them with what’s called a one-ring phone scam.2 This occurs when someone unknowingly calls an international phone number and then gets charged by their phone company for the long-distance call.
The best way to avoid one-ring phone scams is to never call a number you don’t recognize. Always go to an organization’s official website to find their contact information.
The third dimension of this PayPal scam was the international phone number in the phishing email connected the caller directly with the scammer who posed as the PayPal fraud department. The “customer service representative” then asked prying personal and financial questions to glean enough PII to break into a PayPal account or compromise the caller’s identity. This is the most damaging part of the scam. An excellent customer support team may be able to reimburse you your lost money; however, once your personal details are in nefarious hands, you can’t take them back.
In addition to never calling numbers you haven’t verified, never give out passwords and never give out more personal information than you need to. Even in legitimate customer service calls, it’s not rude to ask why the representative requires the information they’re asking for. In a fake call, questions like that may fluster the scammer, so keep an ear tuned to their tone.
Overall, our best advice for handling suspicious emails is to delete them. If it’s truly important, the sender will contact you again. And if a thief somehow stole money from one of your payment apps, the customer service team should be able to walk you through the steps to recover it.
The transfer and handling of large sums of money would make anyone nervous. To give you peace of mind, consider partnering with a service that can help you recover should you ever fall for a scheme and compromise your PII. McAfee+ Ultimate helps you live your best life in private, and the service includes credit monitoring with all three credit bureaus, security freeze, and expert online support to help you navigate any scams you encounter.
Having McAfee+ can protect you from email phishing scams like this. Here are some of the top agencies to report this scam to, if it happens to you: Paypal Fraud Department, Federal Trade Commision , Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency USA.gov IC3
“Report it. Forward phishing emails to reportphishing@apwg.org (an address used by the Anti-Phishing Working Group, which includes ISPs, security vendors, financial institutions, and law enforcement agencies). Let the company or person that was impersonated know about the phishing scheme.” – FTC.gov
1ZDNET, “Watch out for this triple-pronged PayPal phishing and fraud scam.”
2Federal Communications Commission, “‘One Ring’ Phone Scam.”
The post A PayPal Email Scam Is Making the Rounds: Here’s How to Identify and Avoid It appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Watch ThreatWise TV: Explorations in the spam folder
The spam folder: that dark and disregarded corner of every email account, full of too-good-to-be-true offers, unexpected shipments, and supposedly free giveaways.
You’re right to ignore this folder; few good things come from exploring it. But every once in a while one of these misleading, and sometimes malicious, emails manages to evade the filters that normally siphon them off, landing them in your inbox instead.
Fortunately, it’s easy enough to spot these emails if you know what to look for. We’ve investigated this folder once before, showcasing a variety of scams. With the holiday season in full swing, we thought this would be a good time to revisit how scammers are trying to trick unsuspecting users.
The holiday season is traditionally a time when this type of activity increases, and this year is no different. According to research published by credit reporting agency TransUnion, the average daily number of suspected digital fraud attempts was up 82 percent globally between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday (Nov 24–Nov 28) compared to the rest of the year (Jan 1–Nov 23) and 127 percent higher for transactions originating in the US.
This level of activity makes it all the more important to be aware of these scams. With that in mind, let’s dive into the spam folder to get a picture of the types of campaigns currently circulating.
While much of the spam circulating is innocuous, many emails are phishing attempts, and some are indeed malicious. To explore these scams, we used a dedicated computer, segmented from the rest of the network, and leveraged Cisco Secure Malware Analytics to safely open the emails before clicking on links or opening attachments. The point being, we do not recommend doing this at home.
By far, the largest category of spam we saw were surveys scams. According to these emails, if you fill out a simple survey you’ll receive “exclusive offers” such as gift cards, smartphones, smart watches, power drills, or even pots and pans.
There are even some campaigns that specifically target the holiday shopping season.
Clicking the links in these emails takes the recipient to sites where they are asked to fill out a survey.
These pages often include fake testimonials that say how easy the survey is and what they did with their free gift.
The surveys are straightforward, comprising 10-20 simple questions that cover demographic information and shopping habits.
After the survey is completed, these sites offer the choice of a handful of rewards. All the recipient must do is pay for shipping. They are then brought to a page where they can fill out shipping and payment information, and the reward is supposedly shipped.
However, the attempts to make payment often appear to fail, or the recipient is informed that the prize is no longer available.
An unsuspecting user may simply give up at this point, disappointed that they won’t be getting their free gift. What they may not be aware of, is that they have just given their credit card details away in a phishing scam.
In their 2021 Internet Crime Report, the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) said that Non-Payment / Non-Delivery scams such as these led to more than $337 million in losses, up from $265 million in 2020. Credit card fraud amounted to $172 million in 2021 and has been climbing continuously at a conservative rate of 15-20 percent since 2019.
According to Cisco Umbrella, many of the sites asking for credit card details are known phishing sites, or worse, host malware.
Another topic that we covered the last time we explored these types of scams was package delivery spam. These continue to circulate today. There are a variety of shipping companies impersonated in these campaigns, and some generic ones as well.
Many of these campaigns claim that a package could not be delivered. If the recipient clicks on a link in an email, they’re brought to a web page that explains that there are outstanding delivery fees that need to be paid.
The recipient is further enticed by suggestions that the package contains a big-ticket item, such as an iPhone or iPad Pro. All the recipient is required to do is enter their credit card details to cover the shipping.
While no outright malicious activity was detected while examining these emails in Secure Malware Analytics, several suspicious behaviors were flagged. Chances are the bad actors behind these campaigns are phishing for credit card details.
Sometimes the simplest approaches can work just as well as the flashiest. This certainly holds true with spam campaigns, given the prominence of plain-text messages.
The topics covered in such emails run the gamut, including medical cures, 419 scams, romance and dating, pharmaceuticals, weight loss, and many of the scam types we’ve already covered. Many of these link to phishing sites, though some attempt to establish a dialog with the recipient, tricking them into sending the scammers money.
The IC3 report says that victims of confidence fraud and romance scams lost $956 million collectively, which is up from $600 million in 2020. Healthcare fraud, such as the miracle pills and prescriptions scams, resulted in $7 million in losses in 2021, but nearly $30 million in 2020. While these types of scams seem generic and easily spotted, they still work, and so it’s important to be aware and avoid them.
Many emails hitting the spam box attempt to trick users of various services into believing that there is a problem with their account. The problems cover all sorts of services, including streaming platforms, email providers, antivirus subscriptions, and even public records.
If the links are clicked, the recipient is presented with landing pages that mimic the respective services. Any details that are entered will likely be phished, leading to account takeover and/or access to personal records. However, some domains encountered in these cases may do more than just steal information, they could deliver malware too.
Another frequently encountered scam surrounds billing. Many of these appear to be unexpected bills for services the recipient never purchased.
These emails include attachments that are designed to look like official invoices. Interestingly, most of the attachments that we looked at this time were harmless. The goal is to get the recipient to call what appears to be a toll-free number.
While we haven’t called any of these numbers, the experience usually unfolds like a standard customer service call. In the end the “agents” simply claim the charges—which never existed in the first place—have been removed. Meanwhile the scammers steal any personal or financial information provided during the call.
While most billing scams we encountered played out as described above, a few did indeed contain malware.
In this example, the email appears to come from an internet service provider, informing us that our monthly bill is ready.
An invoice appears to be attached, stored within a .zip file. If the recipient opens it and double clicks the file within, a command prompt appears.
This may seem unusual to the recipient, especially since no invoice appears, but by this point it’s too late. The file contains a script that launches PowerShell and attempts to download a remote file.
While the remote file was no longer available at the time of analysis, there is a high likelihood it was malicious. But even though we were unable to determine its contents, Secure Malware Analytics flagged the script execution as malicious.
Knowing about prevalent scams, especially during the holiday season, is a first step in guarding against them. Granted the bad actors who distribute these spam campaigns do everything they can to make their scams look legitimate.
Fortunately, there are several things that you can do to identify scams and defend against them:
But even the best of us can be fooled, and when overseeing a large operation it’s more a matter of when, rather than if, someone clicks on the wrong link. There are elements of the Cisco Secure portfolio that can help for when the inevitable happens.
Cisco Secure Malware Analytics is the malware analysis and malware threat intelligence engine behind all products across the Cisco Security Architecture. The system delivers enhanced, in-depth, advanced malware analysis and context-rich intelligence to help better understand and fight malware within your environments. Secure Malware Analytics is available as a standalone solution, as a component in other Cisco Security solutions, and through software-as-a-service (SaaS) in the cloud, on-premises, and hybrid delivery models.
Cisco Secure Email protects against fraudulent senders, malware, phishing links, and spam. Its advanced threat detection capabilities can uncover known, emerging, and targeted threats. In addition, it defends against phishing by using advance machine learning techniques, real time behavior analytics, relationship modeling, and telemetry that protects against identity deception–based threats.
Cisco Umbrella unifies multiple security functions in a single cloud service to secure internet access. By enforcing security at the DNS layer, Umbrella blocks requests to malware before a connection is even established—before they reach your network or endpoints. In addition, the secure web gateway logs and inspects all web traffic for greater transparency, control, and protection, while the cloud-delivered firewall helps to block unwanted traffic.
Cisco Secure Endpoint is a single-agent solution that provides comprehensive protection, detection, response, and user access coverage to defend against threats to your endpoints. The SecureX platform is built into Secure Endpoint, as are Extended Detection and Response (XDR) capabilities. With the introduction of Cisco Secure MDR for Endpoint, we have combined Secure Endpoint’s superior capabilities with security operations to create a comprehensive endpoint security solution that dramatically decreases the mean time to detect and respond to threats while offering the highest level of always-on endpoint protection.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
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I’m sure you’ve seen them — emails or messages that sound alarming and ask you to act quickly. We live in a digital world that produces hundreds of messages and alerts every day. It’s often hard to determine the validity of a suspicious message or phishing email. Whether you are an administrator, or an end-user, it can be overwhelming to accurately identify a malicious message. When in doubt, here are some questions you should ask yourself:
Is the message from a legitimate sender?
Do I normally receive messages from this person?
If there’s a link, can I tell where it’s sending me?
Attackers continue to evolve their methods, and they’re highly educated on the defenses they come up against in the wild. They’ll craft messages that do not involve any traditional indicators of compromise, such as domains, IP address, or URL links. They’ll also start their attacks by sending messages as an initial lure to establish trust, before sending an email with altered invoice or one claiming to be a helpless employee attempting to get their payroll fixed.
Phishing is a socially-based attack type, one where the threat actors focus on human behavior. When these attacks target organizations, there are multiple levels of attack at play. One that focuses on behavioral patterns and workflow, and the other centers on the victim’s emotional boundaries, such as targeting their desire to help others. You see this pattern frequently in Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks.
Below, we’ve placed an example of a lure, which will test the victim to see if there is a means to quickly establish trust. Here, the threat actor is pretending to be the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of the victim’s organization. If the lure is successful, then the threat actor will progress the attack, and often request sensitive records or wire transfers. Notice that in the email headers, the person pretending to be the CFO is using a Gmail account, one that was likely created just for this attack. The message is brief, stresses importance and urgency, and requests assistance, playing on the victim’s workflow and desire to help an executive or someone with authority.
The example below is a simplified one, to be sure, but the elements are legitimate. Daily, emails like this hit the inboxes of organizations globally, and the attackers only need to locate a single victim to make their efforts payout.
In the FBI / IC3 2021 Internet Crime Report, there were nearly 20,000 Business Email Compromise complaints filed, with an adjusted loss of nearly 2.4 billion dollars. While spoofing the identity of an executive is certainly one way to conduct a BEC attack, the FBI says that threat actors have started leveraging the normality of hybrid-work to target meeting platforms to establish trust and conduct their crimes. When successful, the funds from the fraudulent wire transfers are moved to crypto wallets and the funds dispersed, making recovery harder.
So as an end user what can you do to protect your organization? Be mindful anytime you receive an urgent call to action, especially when the subject involves money. If your workflow means that you regularly receive these types of requests from the specific individual, verify their identity and the validity of the request using another channel of communication, such as in person or via phone. If you do validate their identity via the phone, take care to avoid calling any numbers listed in the email.
Cisco Secure Email helps stop these types of attacks by tracking user relationships and threat techniques. These techniques often include account takeover, spoofing and many more. Using an intent-based approach allows Secure Email to detect and classify business email compromises and other attacks, so administrators are empowered to take a risk-based approach to stopping these threats.
Find out more about how Cisco Secure Email can help keep your organization safe from phishing.
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Cisco Secure Social Channels
One of the oldest tricks in the cybercrime playbook is phishing. It first hit the digital scene in 1995, at a time when millions flocked to America Online (AOL) every day. And if we know one thing about cybercriminals, it’s that they tend to follow the masses. In earlier iterations, phishing attempts were easy to spot due to link misspellings, odd link redirects, and other giveaways. However, today’s phishing tricks have become personalized, advanced, and shrouded in new disguises. So, let’s take a look at some of the different types, real-world examples and how you can recognize a phishing lure.
Every day, users get sent thousands of emails. Some are important, but most are just plain junk. These emails often get filtered to a spam folder, where phishing emails are often trapped. But sometimes they slip through the digital cracks, into a main inbox. These messages typically have urgent requests that require the user to input sensitive information or fill out a form through an external link. These phishing emails can take on many personas, such as banking institutions, popular services, and universities. As such, always remember to stay vigilant and double-check the source before giving away any information.
A sort of sibling to email phishing, link manipulation is when a cybercriminal sends users a link to malicious website under the ruse of an urgent request or deadline. After clicking on the deceptive link, the user is brought to the cybercriminal’s fake website rather than a real or verified link and asked to input or verify personal details. This exact scenario happened last year when several universities and businesses fell for a campaign disguised as a package delivery issue from FedEx. This scheme is a reminder that anyone can fall for a cybercriminals trap, which is why users always have to careful when clicking, as well as ensure the validity of the claim and source of the link. To check the validity, it’s always a good idea to contact the source directly to see if the notice or request is legitimate.
Corporate executives have always been high-level targets for cybercriminals. That’s why C-suite members have a special name for when cybercriminals try to phish them – whaling. What sounds like a silly name is anything but. In this sophisticated, as well as personalized attack, a cybercriminal attempts to manipulate the target to obtain money, trade secrets, or employee information. In recent years, organizations have become smarter and in turn, whaling has slowed down. Before the slowdown, however, many companies were hit with data breaches due to cybercriminals impersonating C-suite members and asking lower-level employees for company information. To avoid this pesky phishing attempt, train C-suite members to be able to identify phishing, as well as encourage unique, strong passwords on all devices and accounts.
Just as email spam and link manipulation are phishing siblings, so too are whaling and spear-phishing. While whaling attacks target the C-suite of a specific organization, spear-phishing rather targets lower-level employees of a specific organization. Just as selective and sophisticated as whaling, spear-phishing targets members of a specific organization to gain access to critical information, like staff credentials, intellectual property, customer data, and more. Spear-phishing attacks tend to be more lucrative than a run-of-the-mill phishing attack, which is why cybercriminals will often spend more time crafting and obtaining personal information from these specific targets. To avoid falling for this phishing scheme, employees must have proper security training so they know how to spot a phishing lure when they see one.
With so many things to click on a website, it’s easy to see why cybercriminals would take advantage of that fact. Content spoofing is based on exactly that notion – a cybercriminal alters a section of content on a page of a reliable website to redirect an unsuspecting user to an illegitimate website where they are then asked to enter personal details. The best way to steer clear of this phishing scheme is to check that the URL matches the primary domain name.
When users search for something online, they expect reliable resources. But sometimes, phishing sites can sneak their way into legitimate results. This tactic is called search engine phishing and involves search engines being manipulated into showing malicious results. Users are attracted to these sites by discount offers for products or services. However, when the user goes to buy said product or service, their personal details are collected by the deceptive site. To stay secure, watch out for potentially sketchy ads in particular and when in doubt always navigate to the official site first.
With new technologies come new avenues for cybercriminals to try and obtain personal data. Vishing, or voice phishing, is one of those new avenues. In a vishing attempt, cybercriminals contact users by phone and ask the user to dial a number to receive identifiable bank account or personal information through the phone by using a fake caller ID. For example, just last year, a security researcher received a call from their financial institution saying that their card had been compromised. Instead of offering a replacement card, the bank suggested simply blocking any future geographic-specific transactions. Sensing something was up, the researcher hung up and dialed his bank – they had no record of the call or the fraudulent card transactions. This scenario, as sophisticated as it sounds, reminds users to always double-check directly with businesses before sharing any personal information.
As you can see, phishing comes in all shapes and sizes. This blog only scratches the surface of all the ways cybercriminals lure unsuspecting users into phishing traps. The best way to stay protected is to invest in comprehensive security and stay updated on new phishing scams.
The post The Seven Main Phishing Lures of Cybercriminals appeared first on McAfee Blog.
With regular marketing emails from brands, businesses, and subscription services, our email accounts are more cluttered than ever. The number of daily emails exchanged globally reached an estimated 319 billion in 2021. Unfortunately, the chances that these emails were spam or junk are quite high. In fact, 45% of all email traffic came from spam emails as of December 2021.
With emails often being the preferred mode of communication for official purposes, it’s important to observe good digital hygiene with your inbox. While a cluttered inbox can be overwhelming, it can also double as a cybersecurity threat. Junk emails that contain malware or act as phishing tools are notorious for wreaking havoc in IT systems or aiding identity theft.
Are you tired of opening your inbox to a barrage of unwanted emails? Read this article to learn how to block or eliminate spam emails.
We know you didn’t sign up to be spammed by unwanted emails. So why is your inbox overflowing with spam messages? It could be one of many reasons, including:
Companies also often share information that you’ve entered during registration with other businesses. Applications for loyalty cards and discount coupons at checkout are also sources of customer information for companies. Although companies are mandated to ask permission before sharing your personal information with affiliates, users often ignore the fine print. So, how do you block these unwanted emails?
Fortunately, most email services let you block this contact or other specific email addresses by following a few simple steps. Usually, just notifying your email service that a certain sender is spamming you does the job. The process varies according to the email provider used. Read on to find out how to keep your inbox clean.
Gmail users can block spam mail using the Gmail app or web app. Follow the steps below to block emails while using the web app:
Open a message from the sender you wish to block. If you don’t have a recent email from them, search their address or name in the search box at the top of the page.
Doing this will cause all future emails from this sender to enter your spam folder. If you block someone you didn’t intend to, follow the same procedure to unblock and start receiving mail from their address.
Follow these steps to block an address using the Outlook (the new Hotmail) web app:
By marking the email as junk, Outlook filters and sends all further emails from the sender to your spam folder.
Like all other service providers, the process of blocking a sender from your Yahoo mail account is quite straightforward. Use your web app and follow these steps to get rid of junk mail from your inbox:
Alternatively, you can also block a sender from the Settings menu.
You can unblock any address by navigating to “Blocked addresses” using the same steps and unblock any ID.
To proactively block senders from your AOL Mail inbox, follow the steps below using your web browser:
Following these simple steps marks all future emails from the chosen sender as spam and sends them to the spam folder.
The Apple iOS email app on iPhone, iPad, and Mac only recently allowed unsubscribing from mailing lists. It still doesn’t let you block senders. Follow the steps detailed below to filter and unsubscribe from senders:
Flag any email as spam by forwarding the email to spam@icloud.com.
Widely used and accepted email services are a frequent target of cyberattacks. Attackers can use email to gain control or access your personal information and resources.
Securing email systems is crucial since your email might contain a lot of sensitive information, including financial documents, legal information, important personal documents, or even trade secrets.
As an email sender and receiver, you should be aware of the most common ways the service is used to infect a computer.
A general rule of thumb is to verify and review download links, forms, and email addresses of the sender before clicking on them, as they can pose significant threats to your cybersecurity. If you receive an email from someone you trust but it contains a link that you find suspicious, multiple websites can analyze URLs and files for malware.
Keeping an email system safe involves securing the servers of the client and the user. As an informal email system user, it can be hard to mitigate and manage risks posed by malicious emails on your own.
Fortunately, you can utilize McAfee+and Identity Theft Protection. McAfee ensures complete cyber protection with advanced monitoring, customized tips according to your usage, and data clean-ups. With multiple subscription plans at your disposal, you can protect yourself and your family from all kinds of cyberthreats.
The post How to Block Emails appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Fears and phobias. We all have them. But what are your biggest ones? I absolutely detest snakes but spiders don’t worry me at all. Well, new research by McAfee shows that cybercriminals and the fear of being hacked are now the 5th greatest fear among Aussies.
With news of data breaches and hacking crusades filling our news feed on a regular basis, many of us are becoming more aware and concerned about the threats we face in our increasingly digital world. And McAfee’s latest confirms this with hackers making their way into Australia’s Top 10 Fears.
According to research conducted by McAfee, snakes are the top phobia for Aussies followed by spiders, heights and sharks. Cybercriminals and the fear of being hacked come in in 5th place beating the dentist, bees, ghosts, aeroplane travel and clowns!
Aussie Top 10 Fears and Phobias
Fears and phobias develop when we perceive that we are at risk of pain, or worse, still, death. And while almost a third of respondents nominated snakes as their number one fear, there is less than one-in-fifty thousand chance of being bitten badly enough by a snake to warrant going to hospital in Australia, according to research from the Internal Medicine Journal.
In contrast, McAfee’s analysis of more than 108 billion potential online threats between October and December, identified 202 million of these threats as genuine risks. With a global population of 7.5 billion, that means there is approximately a one in 37 chance of being targeted by cybercrime. Now while this is not a life-threatening situation, these statistics show that chance of us being affected by an online threat is very real.
According to the research, 82% of Aussies believe that being hacked is a growing or high concern. And when you look at the sheer number of reported data breaches so far this year, these statistics make complete sense. Data breaches have affected Bunnings staff, Federal Parliament staff, Marriott guests, Victorian Government staff, QLD Fisheries members, Skoolbag app users and Big W customers plus many more.
Almost 1 in 5 (19%) of those interviewed said their top fear at work is doing something that will result in a data security breach, they will leak sensitive information or infect their corporate IT systems.
The fear that we are in the midst of a cyberwar is another big concern for many Aussies. Cyberwar can be explained as a computer or network-based conflict where parties try to disrupt or take ownership of the activities of other parties, often for strategic, military or cyberespionage purposes. 55% of Aussies believe that a cyberwar is happening right now but we just don’t know about it. And a fifth believe cyber warfare is the biggest threat to our nation.
Being proactive about protecting your online life is the absolute best way of reducing the chances of being hacked or being affected by a data breach. Here are my top tips on what you can now to protect yourself:
Using a password manager to create unique and complex passwords for each of your online accounts will definitely improve your online safety. If each on your online accounts has a unique password and you are involved in a breach, the hacker won’t be able to use the stolen password details to log into any of your other accounts.
Storing your financial data within your browser and being able to populate online forms quickly within seconds makes the autofill function very attractive however it is risky. Autofill will automatically fill out all forms on a page regardless of whether you can see all the boxes. You may just think you are automatically entering your email address into an online form however a savvy hacker could easily design an online form with hidden boxes designed to capture your financial information. So remove all your financial information from Autofill. I know this means you will have to manually enter information each time you purchase but your personal data will be better protected.
One of the easiest ways for a cybercriminal to compromise their victim is by using phishing emails to lure consumers into clicking links for products or services that could lead to malware, or a phoney website designed to steal personal information. If the deal seems too good to be true, or the email was not expected, always check directly with the source.
It’s important to put the right security solutions in place in order to surf the web safely. Add an extra layer of security to your browser with McAfee WebAdvisor.
I know public Wi-Fi might seem like a good idea, but if consumers are not careful, they could be unknowingly exposing personal information or credit card details to cybercriminals who are snooping on the network. If you are a regular Wi-Fi user, I recommend investing in a virtual private network or (VPN) such as McAfee Secure VPN which will ensure your connection is completely secure and that your data remains safe.
While it is tempting, putting our head in the sand and pretending hackers and cybercrime don’t exist puts ourselves and our families at even more risk! Facing our fears and making an action plan is the best way of reducing our worry and stress. So, please commit to being proactive about your family’s online security. Draw up a list of what you can do today to protect your tribe. And if you want to receive regular updates about additional ways you can keep your family safe online, check out my blog.
‘till next time.
Alex x
The post Aussies Fear Snakes, Spiders and Getting Hacked appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Phishers are enjoying remarkable success using text messages to steal remote access credentials and one-time passcodes from employees at some of the world’s largest technology companies and customer support firms. A recent spate of SMS phishing attacks from one cybercriminal group has spawned a flurry of breach disclosures from affected companies, which are all struggling to combat the same lingering security threat: The ability of scammers to interact directly with employees through their mobile devices.
In mid-June 2022, a flood of SMS phishing messages began targeting employees at commercial staffing firms that provide customer support and outsourcing to thousands of companies. The missives asked users to click a link and log in at a phishing page that mimicked their employer’s Okta authentication page. Those who submitted credentials were then prompted to provide the one-time password needed for multi-factor authentication.
The phishers behind this scheme used newly-registered domains that often included the name of the target company, and sent text messages urging employees to click on links to these domains to view information about a pending change in their work schedule.
The phishing sites leveraged a Telegram instant message bot to forward any submitted credentials in real-time, allowing the attackers to use the phished username, password and one-time code to log in as that employee at the real employer website. But because of the way the bot was configured, it was possible for security researchers to capture the information being sent by victims to the public Telegram server.
This data trove was first reported by security researchers at Singapore-based Group-IB, which dubbed the campaign “0ktapus” for the attackers targeting organizations using identity management tools from Okta.com.
“This case is of interest because despite using low-skill methods it was able to compromise a large number of well-known organizations,” Group-IB wrote. “Furthermore, once the attackers compromised an organization they were quickly able to pivot and launch subsequent supply chain attacks, indicating that the attack was planned carefully in advance.”
It’s not clear how many of these phishing text messages were sent out, but the Telegram bot data reviewed by KrebsOnSecurity shows they generated nearly 10,000 replies over approximately two months of sporadic SMS phishing attacks targeting more than a hundred companies.
A great many responses came from those who were apparently wise to the scheme, as evidenced by the hundreds of hostile replies that included profanity or insults aimed at the phishers: The very first reply recorded in the Telegram bot data came from one such employee, who responded with the username “havefuninjail.”
Still, thousands replied with what appear to be legitimate credentials — many of them including one-time codes needed for multi-factor authentication. On July 20, the attackers turned their sights on internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare.com, and the intercepted credentials show at least three employees fell for the scam.
Image: Cloudflare.com
In a blog post earlier this month, Cloudflare said it detected the account takeovers and that no Cloudflare systems were compromised. Cloudflare said it does not rely on one-time passcodes as a second factor, so there was nothing to provide to the attackers. But Cloudflare said it wanted to call attention to the phishing attacks because they would probably work against most other companies.
“This was a sophisticated attack targeting employees and systems in such a way that we believe most organizations would be likely to be breached,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince wrote. “On July 20, 2022, the Cloudflare Security team received reports of employees receiving legitimate-looking text messages pointing to what appeared to be a Cloudflare Okta login page. The messages began at 2022-07-20 22:50 UTC. Over the course of less than 1 minute, at least 76 employees received text messages on their personal and work phones. Some messages were also sent to the employees family members.”
On three separate occasions, the phishers targeted employees at Twilio.com, a San Francisco based company that provides services for making and receiving text messages and phone calls. It’s unclear how many Twilio employees received the SMS phishes, but the data suggest at least four Twilio employees responded to a spate of SMS phishing attempts on July 27, Aug. 2, and Aug. 7.
On that last date, Twilio disclosed that on Aug. 4 it became aware of unauthorized access to information related to a limited number of Twilio customer accounts through a sophisticated social engineering attack designed to steal employee credentials.
“This broad based attack against our employee base succeeded in fooling some employees into providing their credentials,” Twilio said. “The attackers then used the stolen credentials to gain access to some of our internal systems, where they were able to access certain customer data.”
That “certain customer data” included information on roughly 1,900 users of the secure messaging app Signal, which relied on Twilio to provide phone number verification services. In its disclosure on the incident, Signal said that with their access to Twilio’s internal tools the attackers were able to re-register those users’ phone numbers to another device.
On Aug. 25, food delivery service DoorDash disclosed that a “sophisticated phishing attack” on a third-party vendor allowed attackers to gain access to some of DoorDash’s internal company tools. DoorDash said intruders stole information on a “small percentage” of users that have since been notified. TechCrunch reported last week that the incident was linked to the same phishing campaign that targeted Twilio.
This phishing gang apparently had great success targeting employees of all the major mobile wireless providers, but most especially T-Mobile. Between July 10 and July 16, dozens of T-Mobile employees fell for the phishing messages and provided their remote access credentials.
“Credential theft continues to be an ongoing issue in our industry as wireless providers are constantly battling bad actors that are focused on finding new ways to pursue illegal activities like this,” T-Mobile said in a statement. “Our tools and teams worked as designed to quickly identify and respond to this large-scale smishing attack earlier this year that targeted many companies. We continue to work to prevent these types of attacks and will continue to evolve and improve our approach.”
This same group saw hundreds of responses from employees at some of the largest customer support and staffing firms, including Teleperformanceusa.com, Sitel.com and Sykes.com. Teleperformance did not respond to requests for comment. KrebsOnSecurity did hear from Christopher Knauer, global chief security officer at Sitel Group, the customer support giant that recently acquired Sykes. Knauer said the attacks leveraged newly-registered domains and asked employees to approve upcoming changes to their work schedules.
Image: Group-IB.
Knauer said the attackers set up the phishing domains just minutes in advance of spamming links to those domains in phony SMS alerts to targeted employees. He said such tactics largely sidestep automated alerts generated by companies that monitor brand names for signs of new phishing domains being registered.
“They were using the domains as soon as they became available,” Knauer said. “The alerting services don’t often let you know until 24 hours after a domain has been registered.”
On July 28 and again on Aug. 7, several employees at email delivery firm Mailchimp provided their remote access credentials to this phishing group. According to an Aug. 12 blog post, the attackers used their access to Mailchimp employee accounts to steal data from 214 customers involved in cryptocurrency and finance.
On Aug. 15, the hosting company DigitalOcean published a blog post saying it had severed ties with MailChimp after its Mailchimp account was compromised. DigitalOcean said the MailChimp incident resulted in a “very small number” of DigitalOcean customers experiencing attempted compromises of their accounts through password resets.
According to interviews with multiple companies hit by the group, the attackers are mostly interested in stealing access to cryptocurrency, and to companies that manage communications with people interested in cryptocurrency investing. In an Aug. 3 blog post from email and SMS marketing firm Klaviyo.com, the company’s CEO recounted how the phishers gained access to the company’s internal tools, and used that to download information on 38 crypto-related accounts.
A flow chart of the attacks by the SMS phishing group known as 0ktapus and ScatterSwine. Image: Amitai Cohen for Wiz.io. twitter.com/amitaico.
The ubiquity of mobile phones became a lifeline for many companies trying to manage their remote employees throughout the Coronavirus pandemic. But these same mobile devices are fast becoming a liability for organizations that use them for phishable forms of multi-factor authentication, such as one-time codes generated by a mobile app or delivered via SMS.
Because as we can see from the success of this phishing group, this type of data extraction is now being massively automated, and employee authentication compromises can quickly lead to security and privacy risks for the employer’s partners or for anyone in their supply chain.
Unfortunately, a great many companies still rely on SMS for employee multi-factor authentication. According to a report this year from Okta, 47 percent of workforce customers deploy SMS and voice factors for multi-factor authentication. That’s down from 53 percent that did so in 2018, Okta found.
Some companies (like Knauer’s Sitel) have taken to requiring that all remote access to internal networks be managed through work-issued laptops and/or mobile devices, which are loaded with custom profiles that can’t be accessed through other devices.
Others are moving away from SMS and one-time code apps and toward requiring employees to use physical FIDO multi-factor authentication devices such as security keys, which can neutralize phishing attacks because any stolen credentials can’t be used unless the phishers also have physical access to the user’s security key or mobile device.
This came in handy for Twitter, which announced last year that it was moving all of its employees to using security keys, and/or biometric authentication via their mobile device. The phishers’ Telegram bot reported that on June 16, 2022, five employees at Twitter gave away their work credentials. In response to questions from KrebsOnSecurity, Twitter confirmed several employees were relieved of their employee usernames and passwords, but that its security key requirement prevented the phishers from abusing that information.
Twitter accelerated its plans to improve employee authentication following the July 2020 security incident, wherein several employees were phished and relieved of credentials for Twitter’s internal tools. In that intrusion, the attackers used Twitter’s tools to hijack accounts for some of the world’s most recognizable public figures, executives and celebrities — forcing those accounts to tweet out links to bitcoin scams.
“Security keys can differentiate legitimate sites from malicious ones and block phishing attempts that SMS 2FA or one-time password (OTP) verification codes would not,” Twitter said in an Oct. 2021 post about the change. “To deploy security keys internally at Twitter, we migrated from a variety of phishable 2FA methods to using security keys as our only supported 2FA method on internal systems.”
Update, 6:02 p.m. ET: Clarified that Cloudflare does not rely on TOTP (one-time multi-factor authentication codes) as a second factor for employee authentication.
One way to tame your email inbox is to get in the habit of using unique email aliases when signing up for new accounts online. Adding a “+” character after the username portion of your email address — followed by a notation specific to the site you’re signing up at — lets you create an infinite number of unique email addresses tied to the same account. Aliases can help users detect breaches and fight spam. But not all websites allow aliases, and they can complicate account recovery. Here’s a look at the pros and cons of adopting a unique alias for each website.
What is an email alias? When you sign up at a site that requires an email address, think of a word or phrase that represents that site for you, and then add that prefaced by a “+” sign just to the left of the “@” sign in your email address. For instance, if I were signing up at example.com, I might give my email address as krebsonsecurity+example@gmail.com. Then, I simply go back to my inbox and create a corresponding folder called “Example,” along with a new filter that sends any email addressed to that alias to the Example folder.
Importantly, you don’t ever use this alias anywhere else. That way, if anyone other than example.com starts sending email to it, it is reasonable to assume that example.com either shared your address with others or that it got hacked and relieved of that information. Indeed, security-minded readers have often alerted KrebsOnSecurity about spam to specific aliases that suggested a breach at some website, and usually they were right, even if the company that got hacked didn’t realize it at the time.
Alex Holden, founder of the Milwaukee-based cybersecurity consultancy Hold Security, said many threat actors will scrub their distribution lists of any aliases because there is a perception that these users are more security- and privacy-focused than normal users, and are thus more likely to report spam to their aliased addresses.
Holden said freshly-hacked databases also are often scrubbed of aliases before being sold in the underground, meaning the hackers will simply remove the aliased portion of the email address.
“I can tell you that certain threat groups have rules on ‘+*@’ email address deletion,” Holden said. “We just got the largest credentials cache ever — 1 billion new credentials to us — and most of that data is altered, with aliases removed. Modifying credential data for some threat groups is normal. They spend time trying to understand the database structure and removing any red flags.”
According to the breach tracking site HaveIBeenPwned.com, only about .03 percent of the breached records in circulation today include an alias.
Email aliases are rare enough that seeing just a few email addresses with the same alias in a breached database can make it trivial to identify which company likely got hacked and leaked said database. That’s because the most common aliases are simply the name of the website where the signup takes place, or some abbreviation or shorthand for it.
Hence, for a given database, if there are more than a handful of email addresses that have the same alias, the chances are good that whatever company or website corresponds to that alias has been hacked.
That might explain the actions of Allekabels, a large Dutch electronics web shop that suffered a data breach in 2021. Allekabels said a former employee had stolen data on 5,000 customers, and that those customers were then informed about the data breach by Allekabels.
But Dutch publication RTL Nieuws said it obtained a copy of the Allekabels user database from a hacker who was selling information on 3.6 million customers at the time, and found that the 5,000 number cited by the retailer corresponded to the number of customers who’d signed up using an alias. In essence, RTL argued, the company had notified only those most likely to notice and complain that their aliased addresses were suddenly receiving spam.
“RTL Nieuws has called more than thirty people from the database to check the leaked data,” the publication explained. “The customers with such a unique email address have all received a message from Allekabels that their data has been leaked – according to Allekabels they all happened to be among the 5000 data that this ex-employee had stolen.”
HaveIBeenPwned’s Hunt arrived at the conclusion that aliases account for about .03 percent of registered email addresses by studying the data leaked in the 2013 breach at Adobe, which affected at least 38 million users. Allekabels’s ratio of aliased users was considerably higher than Adobe’s — .14 percent — but then again European Internet users tend to be more privacy-conscious.
While overall adoption of email aliases is still quite low, that may be changing. Apple customers who use iCloud to sign up for new accounts online automatically are prompted to use Apple’s Hide My Email feature, which creates the account using a unique email address that automatically forwards to a personal inbox.
What are the downsides to using email aliases, apart from the hassle of setting them up? The biggest downer is that many sites won’t let you use a “+” sign in your email address, even though this functionality is clearly spelled out in the email standard.
Also, if you use aliases, it helps to have a reliable mnemonic to remember the alias used for each account (this is a non-issue if you create a new folder or rule for each alias). That’s because knowing the email address for an account is generally a prerequisite for resetting the account’s password, and if you can’t remember the alias you added way back when you signed up, you may have limited options for recovering access to that account if you at some point forget your password.
What about you, Dear Reader? Do you rely on email aliases? If so, have they been useful? Did I neglect to mention any pros or cons? Feel free to sound off in the comments below.
Email scammers sent an Uber to the home of an 80-year-old woman who responded to a well-timed email scam, in a bid to make sure she went to the bank and wired money to the fraudsters. In this case, the woman figured out she was being scammed before embarking for the bank, but her story is a chilling reminder of how far crooks will go these days to rip people off.
Travis Hardaway is a former music teacher turned app developer from Towson, Md. Hardaway said his mother last month replied to an email she received regarding an appliance installation from BestBuy/GeekSquad. Hardaway said the timing of the scam email couldn’t have been worse: His mom’s dishwasher had just died, and she’d paid to have a new one delivered and installed.
“I think that’s where she got confused, because she thought the email was about her dishwasher installation,” Hardaway told KrebsOnSecurity.
Hardaway said his mom initiated a call to the phone number listed in the phony BestBuy email, and that the scammers told her she owed $160 for the installation, which seemed right at the time. Then the scammers asked her to install remote administration software on her computer so that they could control the machine from afar and assist her in making the payment.
After she logged into her bank and savings accounts with scammers watching her screen, the fraudster on the phone claimed that instead of pulling $160 out of her account, they accidentally transferred $160,000 to her account. They said they they needed her help to make sure the money was “returned.”
“They took control of her screen and said they had accidentally transferred $160,000 into her account,” Hardaway said. “The person on the phone told her he was going to lose his job over this transfer error, that he didn’t know what to do. So they sent her some information about where to wire the money, and asked her to go to the bank. But she told them, ‘I don’t drive,’ and they told her, “No problem, we’re sending an Uber to come help you to the bank.'”
Hardaway said he was out of town when all this happened, and that thankfully his mom eventually grew exasperated and gave up trying to help the scammers.
“They told her they were sending an Uber to pick her up and that it was on its way,” Hardaway said. “I don’t know if the Uber ever got there. But my mom went over to the neighbor’s house and they saw it for what it was — a scam.”
Hardaway said he has since wiped her computer, reinstalled the operating system and changed her passwords. But he says the incident has left his mom rattled.
“She’s really second-guessing herself now,” Hardaway said. “She’s not computer-savvy, and just moved down here from Boston during COVID to be near us, but she’s living by herself and feeling isolated and vulnerable, and stuff like this doesn’t help.”
According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), seniors are often targeted because they tend to be trusting and polite. More importantly, they also usually have financial savings, own a home, and have good credit—all of which make them attractive to scammers.
“Additionally, seniors may be less inclined to report fraud because they don’t know how, or they may be too ashamed of having been scammed,” the FBI warned in May. “They might also be concerned that their relatives will lose confidence in their abilities to manage their own financial affairs. And when an elderly victim does report a crime, they may be unable to supply detailed information to investigators.”
In 2021, more than 92,000 victims over the age of 60 reported losses of $1.7 billion to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). The FBI says that represents a 74 percent increase in losses over losses reported in 2020.
The abuse of ride-sharing services to scam the elderly is not exactly new. Authorities in Tampa, Fla. say they’re investigating an incident from December 2021 where fraudsters who’d stolen $700,000 from elderly grandparents used Uber rides to pick up bundles of cash from their victims.
Here’s one way you can help reduce your chances of identity theft: remove your personal information from the internet.
And chances are, you have more personal information posted online than you think.
According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), consumers registered 1.4 million identity theft complaints in 2021, all part of a year where consumers reported losing $5.8 billion to fraud overall—a 70% increase over the year prior.
What fuels all this theft and fraud? Access to personal information.
Scammers and thieves can get a hold of personal information in several ways, such as through phishing attacks that lure you into handing it over, malware that steals it from your devices, by purchasing your information on dark web marketplaces, or as a result of information leaked in data breaches, just to name a few.
However, scammers and thieves have other resources to help them commit theft and fraud—data broker sites, places where personal information is posted online for practically anyone to see. Which makes removing your info from them so important, from both an identity and privacy standpoint.
Think of data broker sites as huge repositories of personal information. Search your name and address online and you’ll see. You’ll likely find dozens of sites that turn up information about you, some of which offer a few pieces for free and others that offer far more information for a price.
Data brokers collect and then aggregate personal information from several sources, including:
Data brokers also buy personal information from other data brokers. As a result, some data brokers have thousands of pieces of data for billions of individuals worldwide.
What could that look like? A broker may know how much you paid for your home, your education level, where you’ve lived over the years and who your lived with, your driving record, and possibly your political leanings. A broker may also know your favorite flavor of ice cream and your preferred over-the-counter allergy medicine thanks to information from loyalty cards. Further, they may also have health-related information from fitness apps. The amount of personal information can run that broadly, and that deeply.
With information at this potential level of detail, it’s no wonder that data brokers rake in an estimated at $200 billion U.S. dollars worldwide every year.
On the legitimate side, it’s used by advertisers to create targeted ad campaigns. With information sold by data brokers, they can generate lists based on highly specific criteria, such as shopping histories, personal interests, and even political leanings as mentioned above. Likely without you being aware of it—and likely with no way to contest that information if it’s incorrect.
Other legitimate uses include using these sites for background checks. Law enforcement, reporters, and employers will use data brokers as a starting point for research because the leg work has largely been done for them. Namely, data brokers have aggregated a person’s information already, which is an otherwise time-consuming process.
If this seems a little shady, it’s still legal. As of now, the U.S. has no federal laws that regulate data brokers or require data them to remove personal information if requested. A few states, such as Nevada, Vermont, and California, have legislation in place aimed at protecting consumers. Meanwhile, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union has stricter rules about what information can be collected and what can be done with it. Still, the data broker economy thrives.
On the darker side, scammers and thieves use personal information for identity theft and fraud. With enough personal information gathered from enough sources, they can create a high-fidelity profile of their victims. One that gives them enough information to open new accounts in their name.
So, from the standpoint of both privacy and identity, cleaning up your personal information online makes a great deal of sense.
Let’s review some ways you can remove your personal information from data brokers and other sources on the internet.
The process starts with finding the sites that have your information. From there, you can request to have it removed. Yet as mentioned above, there are dozens and dozens of these sites. Knowing where to start is a challenge in of itself, as is manually making the requests once you have identified the sites that post and sell information about you.
Our Personal Data Cleanup can do the work for you. Personal Data Cleanup scans some of the riskiest data broker sites and shows you which ones are selling your personal info. It also provides guidance on how you can remove your data from those sites and can even manage the removal for you depending on your plan. It also monitors those sites, so if your info gets posted again, you can request its removal again.
As of September 2022, Google accounts for just over 92% of search engine market share worldwide. Aside from being a search engine, Google offers a myriad of other services and applications, such as Gmail and Google Maps. While Google offers plenty of tools for productivity, travel, work, and play for free, they still come at a cost—the gathering and analysis of your personal information.
You can limit the data Google associates with you by removing your name from Google search results with a removal request. This will disable anyone online from getting any results if they search your name. (Note that this will not remove your information from the original sites and sources where it’s posted.) Moreover, Google collects all your browsing data continuously. You have the option to turn on “Auto Delete” in your privacy settings to ensure that the data is deleted regularly and help limit the amount of time your sensitive data stays vulnerable.
You can also occasionally delete your cookies or use your browser in incognito mode to prevent websites from being tracked back to you. Go to your Google Chrome settings to clear your browser and cookie history.
As discussed above, data brokers can collect information from public social media profiles. You can minimize your presence on social media to the bare minimum. Make a list of the ones you use or have used in the past. If there are old accounts that you no longer use or websites that have gone by the wayside like Myspace or Tumblr, you may want to deactivate them or consider deleting them entirely.
For social media platforms that you still may use regularly, like Facebook and Instagram, consider adjusting your privacy settings to ensure that your personal information on these social media platforms is the bare minimum. For example, on Facebook you can lock your profile, while on Instagram you can stay private.
If you’ve ever published articles, written blogs, or created any content online, it might be a good time to consider taking it down if it is no longer serving a purpose. Depending on what you’ve posted, you may have shared personal details about your life. Additionally, you might be mentioned by other people in various social media posts, articles, or blogs. It is worth reaching out to these people to request them to take down posts with sensitive information.
Social media and online articles that host your personal information are often used when businesses or hackers are doing “internet scrapes” to find better ways to use your targeted information. Asking your friends or third-party sites to remove that information can help protect your privacy.
Another way you can tidy up your digital footprint online involves deleting all the unnecessary phone apps that you no longer need or use. Even when apps are not open or in use, they may be able to track personal information such as your real-time location and even your payment details if you have a paid subscription to the app.
Some apps even sell this data as it can be extremely advantageous to other companies, which they use to target certain consumer segments and profiles for advertising. Try to share as little information with apps as possible if you’re looking to minimize your online footprint, and provide them access to your photos, contacts, and location only on as-needed basis and only when the app is in use. Your phone’s app and location services settings will give you the tools to do it.
In addition to the steps above, comprehensive online protection software can keep you more private and minimize your risk of cybercrime. It can include:
So while it may seem like all this rampant collecting and selling of personal information is out of your hands, there’s plenty you can do to take control. With the steps outlined above and strong online protection software at your back, you can keep your personal information more private and secure.
The post 5 Steps to Removing Your Personal Information From the Internet appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Your digital footprint grows with every internet account you make. While your old Tumblr account may be fun for reminiscing, dormant accounts are actually one of the most significant sources of user data on the internet. These accounts can be used by data brokers or third parties to access your personal information.
To improve your data security, it’s good practice to remove public-facing information by deleting unused accounts. Simply put, having less personal data stored on the internet reduces the risk of theft and/or non-consensual data usage.
Deleting, canceling, unsubscribing, or removing your account can be a long process, depending on the service. This article will walk you through the simplest ways to delete unwanted accounts from various social media platforms.
Deleting unwanted accounts protects your information and prevents the monetization of your data. Your internet accounts often hold personal information like your name, age, email, or home address. What’s more alarming is that some platforms may even have credit card details, phone numbers, and bank account information.
When left unattended, internet accounts become vulnerable to being suspended or taken over by the platform. This means that if your accounts are left inactive for too long, you might be handing some or all of your data over to the tech platform.
For example, even if you believe an old Google account doesn’t have any sensitive information stored, it may be linked to other platforms you use (like Amazon or Google services like Gmail and Google Play). This exposes all of these accounts to several data privacy vulnerabilities.
Moreover, a recent survey found that 70% of surveyed adults admitted using the same password for more than one service. People who don’t use password managers or reuse passwords are at a greater security risk than others, as multiple accounts can become compromised at once. Whether the platform is now out of service or you are cutting down on your app usage, deleting dormant accounts will minimize security threats and safeguard your data.
Every platform has a different process for deleting accounts: Some take only a few clicks to complete and others are a little longer. Companies usually don’t want a user to stop using their services, so account deletion pages are often hidden in a complex web of tabs that you have to navigate.
In addition, some subscription services might require that you send an email to customer support to close your account. You can go to justdelete.me, an online directory that lets you access direct links to account deletion pages of various web services.
Remember to download your personal information and data before pulling the plug on your account. Most platforms let you download your data before initiating a deletion request, which saves you from losing important details and files. It is also important to check whether your Google account is used for your YouTube channel or connected to other online accounts.
To help you get rid of accounts you no longer use, we’ve broken down deleting accounts from some of the most popular social networks. The steps described below are for a desktop browser and may not apply to Android or iOS devices (unless specified).
Facebook’s user privacy policy enables it to store a large amount of user information, including personal messages, posts, search history, name, age, birthdate, and even metadata from posted photos and videos.
Follow these simple steps to delete your Facebook account:
LinkedIn collects information on users and uses it for targeted advertising. As a result, it amasses quite a lot of your data, from professional details to personal preferences and even your online behavior trail.
Follow these simple steps from your desktop to delete your account:
It’s simple to delete your Twitter account, but you’ll have to wait 30 days for your data and tweets to clear. To delete your account, you first need to deactivate it.
Once you’ve decided to delete your account from the micro-blogging site, follow these steps from your desktop:
Remember to revoke third-party access to your Twitter account to avoid having your account reactivated in the 30 days following deactivation.
Since Facebook and Instagram are both owned by Meta, they share a lot of data for targeted advertising. You can adjust the privacy settings of your Instagram account from the mobile app, but you will need to log in from a web browser like Chrome to delete your account.
To delete your Instagram account:
Your information and data will be permanently deleted after 30 days and you won’t be able to retrieve it. However, completing a deletion process may take up to 90 days.
Tumblr has a fairly simple process to delete your account:
Follow these steps to delete your account from the popular picture-sharing platform:
Pinterest servers continue to store your data after deletion, but your information won’t be visible to other users.
There are different steps to deleting your email account depending on which email service you use. Backing up email data usually takes more time because of the sheer volume of data a mail account can hold.
Complete the following steps to delete your Google account:
Here’s what you need to do to delete your Yahoo email account:
Deleting your Yahoo account also deletes the linked information from Yahoo’s other services.
Follow these steps to delete your Microsoft account on Outlook 2010, 2013, or 2016:
Leaving old information scattered across the internet makes you susceptible to identity theft. There are multiple ways to keep your identity and data secure online, including McAfee’s Total Protection plan.
Total Protection lets you choose from multiple affordable subscription models that provide comprehensive security against identity theft and potential data breaches and offers web protection and several related benefits. In addition, having access to 24/7 online security experts and a 30-day money-back guarantee make the Total Protection plan an easy, reliable, and safe choice. You can also have peace of mind with McAfee’s Personal Data Cleanup feature where our teams will work to find your personal information online and assist in removing it.
The post How to Delete Old Accounts Containing Personal Information appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Private tech companies gather tremendous amounts of user data. These companies can afford to let you use social media platforms free of charge because it’s paid for by your data, attention, and time.
Big tech derives most of its profits by selling your attention to advertisers — a well-known business model. Various documentaries (like Netflix’s “The Social Dilemma”) have attempted to get to the bottom of the complex algorithms that big tech companies employ to mine and analyze user data for the benefit of third-party advertisers.
This article will help you better understand what information is being collected by tech companies, how it’s being used, and how you can protect your privacy online.
Tech companies benefit from personal information by being able to provide personalized ads. When you click “yes” at the end of a terms and conditions agreement found on some web pages, you may be allowing the companies to collect the following data:
For someone unfamiliar with privacy issues, it is important to understand the extent of big tech’s tracking and data collection. Once these companies collect data, all this information can be supplied to third-party businesses or used to improve user experience.
The problem with this is that big tech has blurred the line between collecting customer data and violating user privacy in some cases. While tracking what content you interact with can be justified under the garb of personalizing the content you see, big tech platforms have been known to go too far. Prominent social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn have faced past legal trouble for accessing personal user data like private messages and saved photos.
The information you provide helps build an accurate character profile and turns it into knowledge that gives actionable insights to businesses. Private data usage can be classified into three cases: selling it to data brokers, using it to improve marketing, or enhancing customer experience.
Along with big data, another industry has seen rapid growth: data brokers. Data brokers buy, analyze, and package your data. Companies that collect large amounts of data on their users stand to profit from this service. Selling data to brokers is an important revenue stream for big tech companies.
Advertisers and businesses benefit from increased information on their consumers, creating a high demand for your information. The problem here is that companies like Facebook and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) have been known to mine massive amounts of user data for the sake of their advertisers.
Marketing can be highly personalized thanks to the availability of large amounts of consumer data. Tracking your response to marketing campaigns can help businesses alter or improve certain aspects of their campaign to drive better results.
The problem is that most AI-based algorithms are incapable of assessing when they should stop collecting or using your information. After a point, users run the risk of being constantly subjected to intrusive ads and other unconsented marketing campaigns that pop up frequently.
Analyzing consumer behavior through reviews, feedback, and recommendations can help improve customer experience. Businesses have access to various facets of data that can be analyzed to show them how to meet consumer demands. This could help improve any part of a consumer’s interaction with the company, from designing special offers and discounts to improving customer relationships.
For most social media platforms, the goal is to curate a personalized feed that appeals to the users and allows them to spend more time on the app. When left unmonitored, the powerful algorithms behind these social media platforms can repeatedly subject you to the same kind of content from different creators.
Here are the big tech companies that collect and mine the most user data.
Users need a comprehensive data privacy solution to tackle the rampant, large-scale data mining carried out by big tech platforms. While targeted advertisements and easily found items are beneficial, many of these companies collect and mine user data through several channels simultaneously, exploiting them in many different ways.
It’s important to make sure your personal information is protected. Protection solutions like McAfee’s Personal Data Cleanup feature can help. With this feature, our teams scour the web for traces of your personal information and assist in getting it removed to enhance your online privacy.
McAfee’s Total Protection provides antivirus software for all of your digital devices and a secure VPN connection to avoid exposure to malicious third parties while browsing the internet. Our identity monitoring and personal data removal solutions further remove gaps in your devices’ security systems.
With our airtight data protection and custom guidance (complete with a protection score for each platform and tips to keep you safer), you can be sure that your internet identity is protected.
The post What Personal Data Do Companies Track? appeared first on McAfee Blog.
U.S. state and federal investigators are being inundated with reports from people who’ve lost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in connection with a complex investment scam known as “pig butchering,” wherein people are lured by flirtatious strangers online into investing in cryptocurrency trading platforms that eventually seize any funds when victims try to cash out.
The term “pig butchering” refers to a time-tested, heavily scripted, and human-intensive process of using fake profiles on dating apps and social media to lure people into investing in elaborate scams. In a more visceral sense, pig butchering means fattening up a prey before the slaughter.
“The fraud is named for the way scammers feed their victims with promises of romance and riches before cutting them off and taking all their money,” the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warned in April 2022. “It’s run by a fraud ring of cryptocurrency scammers who mine dating apps and other social media for victims and the scam is becoming alarmingly popular.”
As documented in a series of investigative reports published over the past year across Asia, the people creating these phony profiles are largely men and women from China and neighboring countries who have been kidnapped and trafficked to places like Cambodia, where they are forced to scam complete strangers over the Internet — day after day.
The most prevalent pig butchering scam today involves sophisticated cryptocurrency investment platforms, where investors invariably see fantastic returns on their deposits — until they try to withdraw the funds. At that point, investors are told they owe huge tax bills. But even those who pay the phony levies never see their money again.
The come-ons for these scams are prevalent on dating sites and apps, but they also frequently start with what appears to be a wayward SMS — such as an instant message about an Uber ride that never showed. Or a reminder from a complete stranger about a planned meetup for coffee. In many ways, the content of the message is irrelevant; the initial goal to simply to get the recipient curious enough to respond in some way.
Those who respond are asked to continue the conversation via WhatsApp, where an attractive, friendly profile of the opposite gender will work through a pre-set script that is tailored to their prey’s apparent socioeconomic situation. For example, a divorced, professional female who responds to these scams will be handled with one profile type and script, while other scripts are available to groom a widower, a young professional, or a single mom.
That’s according to Erin West, deputy district attorney for Santa Clara County in Northern California. West said her office has been fielding a large number of pig butchering inquiries from her state, but also from law enforcement entities around the country that are ill-equipped to investigate such fraud.
“The people forced to perpetrate these scams have a guide and a script, where if your victim is divorced say this, or a single mom say this,” West said. “The scale of this is so massive. It’s a major problem with no easy answers, but also with victim volumes I’ve never seen before. With victims who are really losing their minds and in some cases are suicidal.”
West is a key member of REACT, a task force set up to tackle especially complex forms of cyber theft involving virtual currencies. West said the initial complaints from pig butchering victims came early this year.
“I first thought they were one-off cases, and then I realized we were getting these daily,” West said. “A lot of them are being reported to local agencies that don’t know what to do with them, so the cases languish.”
West said pig butchering victims are often quite sophisticated and educated people.
“One woman was a university professor who lost her husband to COVID, got lonely and was chatting online, and eventually ended up giving away her retirement,” West recalled of a recent case. “There are just horrifying stories that run the gamut in terms of victims, from young women early in their careers, to senior citizens and even to people working in the financial services industry.”
In some cases reported to REACT, the victims said they spent days or weeks corresponding with the phony WhatsApp persona before the conversation shifted to investing.
“They’ll say ‘Hey, this is the food I’m eating tonight’ and the picture they share will show a pretty setting with a glass of wine, where they’re showcasing an enviable lifestyle but not really mentioning anything about how they achieved that,” West said. “And then later, maybe a few hours or days into the conversation, they’ll say, ‘You know I made some money recently investing in crypto,’ kind of sliding into the topic as if this wasn’t what they were doing the whole time.”
Curious investors are directed toward elaborate and official-looking online crypto platforms that appear to have thousands of active investors. Many of these platforms include extensive study materials and tutorials on cryptocurrency investing. New users are strongly encouraged to team up with more seasoned investors on the platform, and to make only small investments that they can afford to lose.
The now-defunct homepage of xtb-market[.]com, a scam cryptocurrency platform tied to a pig butchering scheme.
“They’re able to see some value increase, and maybe even be allowed to take out that value increase so that they feel comfortable about the situation,” West said. Some investors then need little encouragement to deposit additional funds, which usually generate increasingly higher “returns.”
West said many crypto trading platforms associated with pig butchering scams appear to have been designed much like a video game, where investor hype is built around upcoming “trading opportunities” that hint at even more fantastic earnings.
“There are bonus levels and VIP levels, and they’ll build hype and a sense of frenzy into the trading,” West said. “There are definitely some psychological mechanisms at work to encourage people to invest more.”
“What’s so devastating about many of the victims is they lose that sense of who they are,” she continued. “They thought they were a savvy, sophisticated person, someone who’s sort of immune to scams. I think the large scale of the trickery and psychological manipulation being used here can’t be understated. It’s like nothing I’ve seen before.”
Courtney Nolan, a divorced mother of three daughters, says she lost more than $5 million to a pig butchering scam. Nolan lives in St. Louis and has a background in investment finance, but only started investing in cryptocurrencies in the past year.
Nolan’s case may be especially bad because she was already interested in crypto investing when the scammer reached out. At the time, Bitcoin was trading at or near all-time highs of nearly $68,000 per coin.
Nolan said her nightmare began in late 2021 with a Twitter direct message from someone who was following many of the same cryptocurrency influencers she followed. Her fellow crypto enthusiast then suggested they continue their discussion on WhatsApp. After much back and forth about his trading strategies, her new friend agreed to mentor her on how to make reliable profits using the crypto trading platform xtb.com.
“I had dabbled in leveraged trading before, but his mentor program gave me over 100 pages of study materials and agreed to walk me through their investment strategies over the course of a year,” Nolan told KrebsOnSecurity.
Nolan’s mentor had her create an account website xtb-market[.]com, which was made to be confusingly similar to XTB’s official platform. The site promoted several different investment packages, including a “starter plan” that involves a $5,250 up-front investment and promises more than 15 percent return across four separate trading bursts.
Platinum plans on xtb-market promised a whopping 45 percent ROI, with a minimum investment of $265,000. The site also offered a generous seven percent commission for referrals, which encouraged new investors to recruit others.
The now-defunct xtb-market[.]com.
While chatting via WhatsApp, Nolan and her mentor would trade side by side in xtb-market, initially with small investments ranging from $500 to $5,000. When those generated hefty returns, Nolan made bigger deposits. On several occasions she was able to withdraw amounts ranging from $10,000 to $30,000.
But after investing more than $4.5 million of her own money over nearly four months, Nolan found her account was suddenly frozen. She was then issued a tax statement saying she owed nearly $500,000 in taxes before she could reactivate her account or access her funds.
Nolan said it seems obvious in hindsight that she should never have paid the tax bill. Because xtb-market and her mentor cut all communications with her after that, and the entire website disappeared just a few weeks later.
Justin Maile, an investigation partner manager at Chainalysis, told Vice News that the tax portion of the pig butchering scam relies on the “sunk costs fallacy,” when people are reluctant to abandon a failing strategy or course of action because they have already invested heavily in it.
“Once the victim starts getting skeptical or tries to withdraw their funds, they are often told that they have to pay tax on the gains before funds can be unlocked,” Maile told Vice News. “The scammers will try to get any last payments out of the victims by exploiting the sunk cost fallacy and dangling huge profits in front of them.”
Vice recently published an in-depth report on pig butchering’s link to organized crime gangs in Asia that lure young job seekers with the promise of customer service jobs in call centers. Instead, those who show up at the appointed place and time are taken on long car rides and/or forced hikes across the borders into Cambodia, where they are pressed into indentured servitude.
Vice found many of the people forced to work in pig-butchering scams are being held in Chinese-owned casinos operating in Cambodia. Many of those casinos were newly built when the Covid pandemic hit. As the new casinos and hotels sat empty, organized crime groups saw an opportunity to use these facilities to generate huge income streams, and many foreign travelers stranded in neighboring countries were eventually trafficked to these scam centers.
Vice reports:
“While figures on the number of people in scam centers in Cambodia is unknown, best estimates pieced together from various sources point to the tens of thousands across scam centers in Sihanoukville, Phnom Penh, and sites in border regions Poipet and Bavet. In April, Thailand’s assistant national police commissioner said 800 Thai citizens had been rescued from scam centers in Cambodia in recent months, with a further 1,000 citizens still trapped across the country. One Vietnamese worker estimated 300 of his compatriots were held on just one floor in a tall office block hosting scam operations.”
“…within Victory Paradise Resort alone there were 7,000 people, the majority from mainland China, but also Indonesians, Singaporeans and Filipinos. According to the Khmer Times, one 10-building complex of high-rises in Sihanoukville, known as The China Project, holds between 8,000 to 10,000 people participating in various scams—a workforce that would generate profits around the $1 billion mark each year at $300 per worker per day.”
REACTs’ West said while there are a large number of pig butchering victims reporting their victimization to the FBI, very few are receiving anything more than instructions about filing a complaint with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), which keeps track of cybercrime losses and victims.
“There’s a huge gap in victims that are seeing any kind of service at all, where they’re reporting to the FBI but not being able to talk to anyone,” she said. “They’re filling out the IC3 form and never hearing back. It sort of feels like the federal government is ignoring this, so people are going to local agencies, which are sending these victims our way.”
For many younger victims of pig butchering, even losses of a few thousand dollars can be financially devastating. KrebsOnSecurity recently heard from two different readers who said they were in their 20s and lost more than $40,000 each when the investment platforms they were trading on vanished with their money.
The FBI can often bundle numerous IC3 complaints involving the same assailants and victims into a single case for federal prosecutors to pursue the guilty, and/or try to recapture what was stolen. In general, however, victims of crypto crimes rarely see that money again, or if they do it can take many years.
“The next piece is what can we actually do with these cases,” West said. “We used to frame success as getting bad people behind bars, but these cases leave us as law enforcement with not a lot of opportunity there.”
West said the good news is U.S. authorities are seeing some success in freezing cryptocurrency wallets suspected of being tied to large-scale cybercriminal operations. Indeed, Nolan told KrebsOnSecurity that her losses were substantial enough to warrant an official investigation by the FBI, which she says has since taken steps to freeze at least some of the assets tied to xtb-market[.]com.
Likewise, West said she was recently able to freeze cryptocurrency funds stolen from some pig butchering victims, and now REACT is focusing on helping state and local authorities learn how to do the same.
“It’s important to be able to mobilize quickly and know how to freeze and seize crypto and get it back to its rightful owner,” West said. “We definitely have made seizures in cases involving pig butchering, but we haven’t gotten that back to the rightful owners yet.”
In April, the FBI warned Internet users to be on guard against pig butchering scams, which it said attracts victims with “promises of romance and riches” before duping them out of their money. The IC3 said it received more than 4,300 complaints related to crypto-romance scams, resulting in losses of more than $429 million.
Here are some common elements of a pig butchering scam:
–Dating apps: Pig-butchering attempts are common on dating apps, but they can begin with almost any type of communication, including SMS text messages.
–WhatsApp: In virtually all documented cases of pig butchering, the target is moved fairly quickly into chatting with the scammer via WhatsApp.
–No video: The scammers will come up with all kinds of excuses not to do a video call. But they will always refuse.
–Investment chit-chat: Your contact (eventually) claims to have inside knowledge about the cryptocurrency market and can help you make money.
The FBI’s tips on avoiding crypto scams:
-Never send money, trade, or invest based on the advice of someone you have only met online.
-Don’t talk about your current financial status to unknown and untrusted people.
-Don’t provide your banking information, Social Security Number, copies of your identification or passport, or any other sensitive information to anyone online or to a site you do not know is legitimate.
-If an online investment or trading site is promoting unbelievable profits, it is most likely that—unbelievable.
-Be cautious of individuals who claim to have exclusive investment opportunities and urge you to act fast.
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