Meta provided insight this week into the company’s efforts in taking down more than 2 million accounts that were connected to pig butchering scams on their owned platforms, Facebook and Instagram.
Pig butchering scams are big business, with hundreds of millions of dollars involved every year. The numbers are not precise because some researchers see these scams as a special kind of romance scam, while others classify them as investment fraud, muddying the numbers based on which group is counting what type of loss. Still, the general idea is that scammers use elaborate storylines to fatten up victims into believing they are in a romantic or otherwise close personal relationship. Once the victim places enough trust in the scammer, they bring the victim into a cryptocurrency investment scheme.
Read more…
Source: Malwarebytes Labs
Related:
- New Spam Campaign via Necurs Botnet Tries to Manipulate the Stock Market
March 21, 2017
The Necurs botnet is known as the largest spam botnet in the world, particularly for distributing Locky ransomware and Dridex. Now, it looks like Necurs is taking on a new role as someone tries to manipulate the stock market. The discovery was made by Cisco’s threat intelligence organization Talos, which notes that after being offline for ...
- Cyber Firm at Center of Russian Hacking Charges Misread Data
March 21, 2017
An influential British think tank and Ukraine’s military are disputing a report that the U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has used to buttress its claims of Russian hacking in the presidential election. The CrowdStrike report, released in December, asserted that Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app, resulting in heavy losses of howitzers in Ukraine’s war with ...
- Personalized spam campaign targets Germany
March 20, 2017
A spam campaign Symantec observed in January 2017 targeting people who live in Germany appears to be, once again, using detailed, real personal information to enhance the believability of the messages. Victims who open the message attachments are likely to have their Windows computers infected with malware that steals banking information. First seen in the UK Symantec ...
- Cybercriminals getting as good as nation state spies – report
March 14, 2017
The European energy sector is being targeted by advanced threat actors seeking proprietary information to advance the capabilities of domestic companies, according to FireEye Mandiant. The latest annual report by FireEye’s incident response arm further warns that cyber threat groups are also targeting European industrial control systems for potentially disruptive or destructive operations. The capability of cybercriminals ...
- Fighting cyber crimes in offshore oil and gas industry
March 1, 2017
Cyber crime costs offshore oil and gas companies millions each year in lost business and damaged equipment, a cyber attack on critical infrastructure, such as an oil rig, can result in more than just lost revenue but it can be catastrophic for the environment and have far reaching impacts. However, cyber security on actual installations is ...
- New Global Cybersecurity Report Reveals Misaligned Incentives, Executive Overconfidence Create Advantages for Attacker
March 1, 2017
Intel Security, in partnership with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), today released “Tilting the Playing Field: How Misaligned Incentives Work Against Cybersecurity,” a global report and survey revealing three categories of misaligned incentives: corporate structures versus the free flow of criminal enterprises; strategy versus implementation; and senior executives versus those in implementation ...