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:
- Two hacking groups responsible for huge spike in hacked Magento 2.x stores
June 12, 2019
Two hacker groups are responsible for a huge spike in the number of hacked Magento 2.x shopping sites, according to Willem de Groot, founder of Sanguine Security. This is now the third month in a row when the number of hacked Magento 2.x sites has doubled, after it previously doubled from March to April, and again ...
- New FormBook Dropper Harbors Obfuscation, Persistence
June 12, 2019
Never-before-seen dropper found in FormBook samples that has increased persistence and obfuscation capabilities. Researchers are warning that a future data-theft attack may be brewing after discovering a new sample of the FormBook malware, with a never-before-seen dropper — i.e. a malicious file that is used in the initial infection stage and installs malware on the system. FormBook, ...
- FBI Issues Warning on ‘Secure’ Websites Used For Phishing
June 10, 2019
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued a public service announcement regarding TLS-secured websites being actively used by malicious actors in phishing campaigns. Internet users are accustomed by now to always look at the padlock next to the web browser’s address bar to check if the current page is served by a website secured using a ...
- Hacker Discloses Second Zero-Day to Bypass Patch for Windows EoP Flaw
June 7, 2019
An anonymous security researcher going by the name of SandboxEscaper today publicly shared a second zero-day exploit that can be used to bypass a recently patched elevation of privilege vulnerability in the Microsoft Windows operating system. SandboxEscaper is known for publicly dropping zero-day exploits for unpatched Windows vulnerabilities. In the past year, the hacker has disclosed ...
- Hackers are scanning for MySQL servers to deploy GandCrab ransomware
May 24, 2019
At least one Chinese hacking crew is currently scanning the internet for Windows servers that are running MySQL databases so they can infect these systems with the GandCrab ransomware. These attacks are somewhat unique, as cyber-security firms have not seen any threat actor until now that has attacked MySQL servers running on Windows systems to infect ...
- Trickbot Watch: Arrival via Redirection URL in Spam
May 20, 2019
Trend Micro discovered a variant of the Trickbot banking trojan (detected by Trend Micro as TrojanSpy.Win32.TRICKBOT.THDEAI) using a redirection URL in a spam email. In this particular case, the variant used Google to redirect from the URL hxxps://googledm:443/url?q=<trickbot downloader>, whereby the URL in the query string, url?q=<url>, is the malicious URL that the user is redirected to. ...