Inside the underground fake review trade


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:

  • New Mimic Ransomware Abuses Everything APIs for its Encryption Process

    January 26, 2023

    Trend Micro researchers discovered a new ransomware that abuses the APIs of a legitimate tool called Everything, a Windows filename search engine developed by Voidtools that offers quick searching and real-time updates for minimal resource usage. This ransomware (which Trend Micro researchers named Mimic based on a string we found in its binaries), was first ...

  • HHS: Ransomware groups continue to target U.S. health sector

    January 25, 2023

    The Royal and Blackcat ransomware groups continue to aggressively target the U.S. health sector, according to a recent advisory from the Department of Health and Human Services. Just this week, the Washington Post described an apparent recent attack by Blackcat on NextGen Healthcare, a company that provides electronic health record and practice management software to ...

  • ACSC Ransomware Profile – Royal

    January 24, 2023

    The Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) is aware of a ransomware variant called Royal, which is being used by cybercriminals to conduct ransomware attacks against multiple sectors and organisations worldwide, including Australia. Once gaining access to a victim’s environment, cybercriminals use this ransomware for similar purposes to other variants such as encrypting their data and ...

  • Vice Society Ransomware Group Targets Manufacturing Companies

    January 24, 2023

    The Vice Society ransomware group made headlines in late 2022 and early 2023 during a spate of attacks against several targets, such as the one that affected the rapid transit system in San Francisco. Most reports have the threat actor focusing its efforts on the education and the healthcare industries. However, through Trend Micro’s telemetry data, ...

  • LastPass owner GoTo says hackers stole customers’ backups

    January 24, 2023

    LastPass’ parent company GoTo – formerly LogMeIn – has confirmed that cybercriminals stole customers’ encrypted backups during a recent breach of its systems. The breach was first confirmed by LastPass on November 30. At the time, LastPass chief executive Karim Toubba said an “unauthorized party” had gained access to some customers’ information stored in a third-party ...

  • Russia’s largest ISP says 2022 broke all DDoS attack records

    January 23, 2023

    Russia’s largest internet service provider Rostelecom says 2022 was a record year for Distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) targeting organizations in the country. DDoS attacks are cyberattacks aimed at making an internet-connected website or service unavailable by overwhelming it with many requests that deplete the server’s ability to accept new connections, causing the service to ...