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:
- Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 Discovers 27 New Vulnerabilities Across Microsoft Products
October 2, 2020
Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 threat researchers have been credited with discovering 27 new vulnerabilities addressed by the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), as part of its last nine months of security update releases. Vulnerabilities The Microsoft vulnerabilities discovered included 27 vulnerabilities rated “important,” including Remote Code Execution, Privilege Elevation, Information Disclosure and one Denial of Service ...
- Researchers use ‘fingerprints’ to track Windows exploit developers
October 2, 2020
More to the point, Check Point security researchers Itay Cohen and Eyal Itkin were able to track 16 Windows Kernel Local Privilege Escalation (LPE) exploits to two different exploit developers known as Volodya (or BuggiCorp) and PlayBit (or luxor2008). 15 of the exploits Check Point successfully matched to a known exploit dev were created between 2015 ...
- IPStorm botnet expands from Windows to Android, Mac, and Linux
October 1, 2020
IPStorm, a malware botnet that was first spotted last year targeting Windows systems, has evolved to infect other types of platforms, such as Android, Linux, and Mac devices. Furthermore, the botnet has also quadrupled in size, growing from around 3,000 infected systems in May 2019 to more than 13,500 devices this month. These latest developments put IPStorm ...
- Microsoft: Some ransomware attacks take less than 45 minutes
September 29, 2020
For many years, the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report has been the gold standard in terms of providing a yearly overview of all the major events and trends in the cyber-security and threat intelligence landscape. While Microsoft unceremoniously retired the old SIR reports back in 2018, the OS maker appears to have realized its mistake, and has ...
- Cross-Platform / Modular Glupteba Malware Uses ManageX
September 29, 2020
We recently encountered a variant of Glupteba (detected by Trend Micro as Trojan.Win32.GLUPTEBA.WLDR). Glupteba is a trojan type that has been involved with Operation Windigo in the past. We also reported its attacks on MikroTik routers and updates on its command and control (C&C) servers. With regard to its behavior, the variant shares many similarities with ...
- DDoS attacks are getting more powerful as attackers change tactics
September 29, 2020
There’s been a surge in Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks throughout the course of this year, and the attacks are getting more powerful and more disruptive. DDoS attacks are launched against websites or web services with the aim of disrupting them to the extent that they are taken offline. Attackers direct the traffic from a ...
