Recently, our team exposed sophisticated scam kits designed to steal sensitive data and trick consumers. But underground marketplaces are not just for malware and stolen passwords. They also offer services designed to manipulate your opinion of the products and services you buy every day.
In our latest research, we examined cybercrime forums where sellers advertise illicit “reputation management” services. For the right price, these underground operators offer to flood a product with glowing, five-star ratings or remove negative reviews. This shadowy industry works both ways—artificially boosting reputations and deliberately hiding legitimate complaints.
A major shift we are seeing in this space is the adoption of new technology. We also found that cybercriminals are using AI to automate these fake review campaigns. This could allow them to quickly generate realistic, human-sounding feedback in large volumes without much manual effort.
Read more…
Source: Malwarebytes Labs
Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox
Related:
- M&S: WFH staff locked out of systems amid cyber attack fallout
April 28, 2025
M&S has shut remote-working employees out of some of its IT systems as it struggles to recover from the fallout of a cyberattack last week. The high street giant closed some of the programmes that staff use to log into the internal IT systems when working outside of the office, The Times reported. Cybersecurity experts said ...
- Android malware turns phones into malicious tap-to-pay machines
April 24, 2025
Got an Android phone? Got a tap-to-pay card? Then you’re like millions of other users now at risk from a new form of cybercrime – malware that can read your credit or debit card and hand its data over to an attacker. A newly discovered malicious program effectively turns Android phones into malicious tap machines that ...
- M&S: FTSE 100 giant battling cyber attack
April 22, 2025
M&S has revealed it has been battling what it has described as a “cyber incident” over the past few days. The FTSE 100 giant said that it’s made some “minor, temporary changes to our store operations to protect customers and the business” and “we are sorry for any inconvenience experienced.” M&S confirmed that it is working ...
- FOG Ransomware Spread by Cybercriminals Claiming Ties to DOGE
April 21, 2025
During trend Micro researchers monitoring of the ransomware threat landscape, they discovered samples with infection chain characteristics and payloads that can be attributed to FOG ransomware. A total of nine samples were uploaded to VirusTotal between March 27 and April 2, which the researchers recently discovered were multiple ransomware binaries with .flocked extension and readme.txt notes. ...
- Lumma Stealer – Tracking distribution channels
April 21, 2025
The evolution of Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS) has significantly lowered the barriers to entry for cybercriminals, with information stealers becoming one of the most commercially successful categories in this underground economy. Among these threats, Lumma Stealer has emerged as a particularly sophisticated player since its introduction in 2022 by the threat actor known as Lumma. Initially marketed as ...
- New Rust Botnet “RustoBot” is Routed via Routers
April 21, 2025
FortiGuard Labs recently discovered a new botnet propagating through TOTOLINK devices. Unlike previous malware targeting these devices, this variant is written in Rust—a programming language introduced by Mozilla in 2010. Due to its Rust-based implementation, we’ve named the malware “RustoBot.” In January and February of 2025, FortiGuard Labs observed a significant increase in alerts related to ...
