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:
- Network Attack Trends: Internet of Threats
January 22, 2021
Unit 42 researchers observed interesting attack trends from August-October 2020. Despite a surge in scanner activities and HTTP directory traversal exploitation attempts, CVE-2012-2311 and CVE-2012-1823, which were the most commonly exploited vulnerabilities in the wild in early summer 2020, are no longer at the top of that list. Several new critical exploits, including but not ...
- Cybercriminals kick-off 2021 with sweepstakes, credit card, delivery scams
January 22, 2021
Trend Micro researches have predicted that this year, cybercriminals will continue to take advantage of Covid-19-related effects and incidents — such as people’s reliance on online purchases and e-services and the increased need for financial assistance — in order to bait victims and steal critical information. Even though new ways of stealing information regularly arise, ...
- Windows Remote Desktop servers now used to amplify DDoS attacks
January 21, 2021
Windows Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) servers are now being abused by DDoS-for-hire services to amplify Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. The Microsoft RDP service is a built-in Windows service running on TCP/3389 and/or UDP/3389 that enables authenticated remote virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) access to Windows servers and workstations. Attacks taking advantage of this new UDP reflection/amplification ...
- Hacker leaks full database of 77 million Nitro PDF user records
January 20, 2021
A stolen database containing the email addresses, names, and passwords of more than 77 million records of Nitro PDF service users was leaked today for free. The 14GB leaked database contains 77,159,696 records with users’ email addresses, full names, bcrypt hashed passwords, titles, company names, IP addresses, and other system-related information. The massive Nitro PDF data breach ...
- Cyberattack fears raise the alarm in Eastern European countries
January 20, 2021
The cyberattacks that targeted multiple US government agencies and companies in recent months have raised the alarm in developing Eastern European countries regarding their own cybersecurity capabilities. During the past year, some of them, like North Macedonia, have already experienced breaches of their state IT systems: last summer, the country had its electoral process disrupted by ...
- VPNFilter Two Years Later: Routers Still Compromised
January 19, 2021
With the internet of things (IoT) gaining more popularity, common IoT devices such as routers, printers, cameras, and network-attached storage (NAS) devices, are becoming more frequent targets for cybercriminals. Unlike typical operating systems such as Windows and macOS, users are less likely to patch IoT devices. This is because users find the task more difficult and ...