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:
- DDoS Attacks That Employ TCP Amplification Cause Network Congestion, Secondary Outages
November 14, 2019
Over the past month, threat actors have been using a relatively non-conventional approach to mount a flurry of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks: through TCP amplification. Security company Radware shared its observations on multiple campaigns involving Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) reflection attacks, specifically SYN-ACK reflection attacks, against companies across the world. The scope of the impact was ...
- Labour Party says it has been hit by ‘large-scale cyber attack’
November 12, 2019
Labour says it has been hit by a “sophisticated and large-scale cyber attack” on its digital platforms. A party spokeswoman said the cyber attack “failed” because of their “robust security systems” and that she was confident no data breach occurred. “Security procedures have slowed down some of our campaign activities, but these were restored this morning and we ...
- Emotet resurgence packs in new binaries, Trickbot functions
November 6, 2019
Emotet, a Banking Trojan turned devastating modular threat, has returned with upgraded functions in a new wave of attacks. The malware, first discovered in 2014, has evolved over the past few years from a relatively basic, singular threat into a customizable modular package used to deploy additional payloads against financial institutions, the enterprise, and consumers worldwide. Emotet, believed to ...
- Buran Ransomware; the Evolution of VegaLocker
November 5, 2019
McAfee’s Advanced Threat Research Team observed how a new ransomware family named ‘Buran’ appeared in May 2019. Buran works as a RaaS model like other ransomware families such as REVil, GandCrab (now defunct), Phobos, etc. The author(s) take 25% of the income earned by affiliates, instead of the 30% – 40%, numbers from notorious malware families ...
- Canadian Nunavut government systems crippled by ransomware
November 5, 2019
Canadian government IT systems have been forced into lockdown after a successful ransomware attack. On Monday, government officials for the Nunavut region said that over the weekend, a “new and sophisticated type of ransomware” struck the territory. All government services — with the exception of an energy corporation — that rely on access to electronic information stored ...
- Wizard Spider Upgrades Ryuk Ransomware to Reach Deep into LANs
November 4, 2019
The Ryuk ransomware has added two features to enhance its effectiveness: The ability to target systems that are in “standby” or sleep mode; and the use of Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) pinging to find drives on a company’s LAN. Both are employed after the initial network compromise of a victim organization. Ryuk, which is distributed by ...