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:
- FBI Warns of Scammers Impersonating the IC3
July 20, 2026
This Public Service Announcement contains updated information about an ongoing fraud scheme where criminal scammers are impersonating FBI personnel facilitating Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) complaints to deceive and revictimize individuals. This scheme combines several exploitation tactics to include the targeting of previous victims, the use of artificial intelligence (AI)-generated videos to create fictitious or misleading promotional ...
- Hugging Face confirms breach affected internal datasets and credentials
July 20, 2026
Hugging Face, a platform that hosts AI models and datasets, said its internal datasets and service credentials were compromised in a hack last week. The company disclosed the breach on Friday, but said it was still investigating whether any customer or partner data was stolen during the incident. In a blog post, the company said a dataset uploaded ...
- Ernst & Young reveals data breach following hack on support system
July 20, 2026
Ernst & Young (EY) has confirmed suffering a cyberattack in which it lost sensitive customer information, including tax data. In a data breach notification letter sent to affected individuals, the firm said that on April 23, 2026, it spotted “anomalous activity” within a third-party platform its IT team uses. This is an IT service management platform ...
- HOLLOWGRAPH: Turning Microsoft 365 Calendars into Covert Command-and-Control Channels
July 20, 2026
The Group-IB Threat Intelligence team has identified HOLLOWGRAPH, a new malware sample that we attribute, with high confidence, to the Cavern backdoor framework. This malware is one component of a larger toolkit, and it uses the Microsoft Graph API through a compromised Microsoft 365 account observed in Israel to communicate with its operators — a technique ...
- Healthcare giant Abbott probes two cyber incidents amid extortion claims
July 20, 2026
Abbott Laboratories, one of the world’s largest healthcare and medical device companies, is investigating two apparently unrelated cyber incidents after confirming unauthorized access to internal systems. While Abbott says there has been no impact on manufacturing, laboratory operations, or patient care, cybercriminal groups ShinyHunters and ShadowByt3$ claim the breaches were far more extensive. Those claims ...
- Hackers breached DHS after alarms were twice ruled ‘false positives’
July 17, 2026
Hackers managed to find their way into the US Department of Homeland Security’s primary information sharing platform, gaining unfettered access to the HSIN network that hosts unclassified information that multiple US agencies and international rely on. The hack allowed the attackers to modify server files, run malicious code and steal credential files while installing backdoors and ...