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:

  • Windows MSHTML zero-day exploits shared on hacking forums

    September 12, 2021

    Threat actors are sharing Windows MSHTML zero-day (CVE-2021-40444) tutorials and exploits on hacking forums, allowing other hackers to start exploiting the new vulnerability in their own attacks. Last Tuesday, Microsoft disclosed a new zero-day vulnerability in Windows MSHTML that allows threat actors to create malicious documents, including Office and RTF docs, to execute commands on a ...

  • REvil ransomware is back in full attack mode and leaking data

    September 11, 2021

    The REvil ransomware gang has fully returned and is once again attacking new victims and publishing stolen files on a data leak site. Since 2019, the REvil ransomware operation, aka Sodinokibi, has been conducting attacks on organizations worldwide where they demand million-dollar ransoms to receive a decryption key and prevent the leaking of stolen files. While in ...

  • Ransomware groups continue assault on healthcare orgs as COVID-19 infections increase

    September 11, 2021

    Ransomware groups have shown no signs of slowing down their assault on hospitals, seemingly ramping up attacks on healthcare institutions as dozens of countries deal with a new wave of COVID-19 infections thanks to the potent Delta variant. Vice Society, one of the newer ransomware groups, debuted in June and made a name for themselves by ...

  • SOVA, Worryingly Sophisticated Android Trojan, Takes Flight

    September 10, 2021

    A new Android banking trojan named SOVA (“owl” in Russian) is under active development, researchers said, and it has big dreams even in its infancy stage. The malware is looking to incorporate distributed denial of service (DDoS), man in the middle (MiTM) and ransomware functionality into its arsenal – on top of existing banking overlay, ...

  • Ukrainian man extradited to the US to face botnet, data theft charges

    September 10, 2021

    A Ukrainian man was arrested in Poland and extradited to the US to face charges as an alleged botnet operator. The US Department of Justice (DoJ) said this week that Glib Oleksandr Ivanov-Tolpintsev was taken into custody in Korczowa, Poland, on October 3 last year. As the US and Poland have an extradition treaty, the 28-year-old was ...

  • Hackers leak passwords for 500,000 Fortinet VPN accounts

    September 8, 2021

    A threat actor has leaked a list of almost 500,000 Fortinet VPN login names and passwords that were allegedly scraped from exploitable devices last summer. While the threat actor states that the exploited Fortinet vulnerability has since been patched, they claim that many VPN credentials are still valid. This leak is a serious incident as the VPN ...