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:
- ENISA: Incidents Handling and Cybercrime Investigations
March 8, 2022
The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) explores how CSIRTs, law enforcement agencies and the judiciary cooperate and how they can train together to better tackle cyber incidents and respond to cybercrime. The report published today facilitates the cooperation between CSIRTs and law enforcement agencies (LEAs) and looks into their interaction with the judiciary (judges and ...
- New RURansom Wiper Targets Russia
March 8, 2022
A conflict in cyberspace is unfolding parallel to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine on the ground. Cyberattacks are being lobbed against both Russian and Ukrainian sides, with a new wiper directed against Russia joining the fray. On March 1, a tweet from MalwareHunterTeam about a possible ransomware variant caught our attention and set our immediate ...
- FBI: RagnarLocker Ransomware Indicators of Compromise
March 7, 2022
The FBI first became aware of RagnarLocker in April 2020 and subsequently produced a FLASH to disseminate known indicators of compromise (IOCs) at that time. This FLASH provides updated and additional IOCs to supplement that report. As of January 2022, the FBI has identified at least 52 entities across 10 critical infrastructure sectors affected by ...
- SharkBot malware hides as Android antivirus in Google Play
March 5, 2022
SharkBot banking malware has infiltrated the Google Play Store, the official Android app repository, posing as an antivirus with system cleaning capabilities. Although the trojan app was far from popular, its presence in Play Store shows that malware distributors can still bypass Google’s automatic defenses. The app is still present in Google’s store at the moment ...
- Russia shares list of 17,000 IPs allegedly DDoSing Russian orgs
March 5, 2022
The Russian government shared a list of 17,576 IP addresses allegedly used to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks targeting Russian organizations and their networks. The list was shared by the National Coordination Center for Computer Incidents (NKTsKI), an organization created by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), together with guidance to defend against the attacks and ...
- Ukraine digital army brews cyberattacks, intel and infowar
March 5, 2022
Formed in a fury to counter Russia’s blitzkrieg attack, Ukraine’s hundreds-strong volunteer “hacker” corps is much more than a paramilitary cyberattack force in Europe’s first major war of the internet age. It is crucial to information combat and to crowdsourcing intelligence . “We are really a swarm. A self-organizing swarm,” said Roman Zakharov, a 37-year-old IT ...