It is Medicare scam season when Medicare patients can change their insurance plan for the new year, and that means………more...
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Pig-butchering may be proving the Luddites were right. The social-engineering scam bypassed ransomware as the most profitable cybercrime approximately two years ago. After government regulations and law enforcement took a big bite out of returns for ransomware this past year, public-private partnerships are taking aim at the new champ.
TL;DR
* Pig butchering eclipses losses from ransomware
* Top targets are tech savvy people under 50
* Human error trumps cyber awareness
* Public/private partnerships making inroads at dismantling scam operations
* Tips to avoid scams
* Podcast with Arkose CEO
Between 2020 and 20023, scammers reaped more than $75 billion from victims around the world. Approximately 90 percent of the losses came from of purchasing fraudulent cryptocurrency, according to the US Treasury Department’s, Financial Crimes Enforcement Center. In comparison, ransomware attacks in that same period harvested $20 billion worldwide in ransoms and cost approximately another $20 billion in recovery costs.
On Mastodon a poster asked last week, “Looking for an article or blog or text, that succinctly describes, at grade 1 level English, why ‘if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear’ is a crazy and bad argument, and perhaps also includes what some good arguments are.” We thought that is an excellent idea for a Scam Bucket post. Let’s get to the biggest argument against that philosophy.
It may not be scandalous, like a drug addiction, pornography or drug dealing, but there is personal information that everyone wants to keep from someone like passwords, account number and routing number to your bank account, and social security numbers
People who ascribe to the philosophy will readily agree to those limitations of what should be available to public knowledge. What they may not be willing to admit that they have done something in their life that they are ashamed. As Jesus Christ once proclaimed, “No one is without sin. No, not one.”
Sometimes, the error is made in ignorance. Clicking on a link in an email that connects to a porn site. Being rude to a waiter or failing to give a tip. Road rage someone recorded without knowledge or consent. Sometimes it was a mistake they made when they were younger and didn’t know any better… or knew better and did it anyway.
Then there are things that people are totally innocent of but were accused of it anyway. An average of 200–300 people are arrested every year for felonies but are exonerated, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. If the arrest was reported in the news, it is likely the exoneration was not. So the news of the arrest still exists even though they did not commit the crime.
John Gilmore, director of research at the data-scrubbing service DeleteMe, related a story of Jordan Greene, a journalist who covered neo-Nazi rally in North Carolina. Members of the group picked out his face in a photo of the rally, ran it through facial recognition, found where he lived and showed up at his house holding burning flares.
A recent scam has arisen ...
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As legislatures around the world try to get a handle on the growth of ransomware, another category of cybercrime is festering out of control: Elder fraud.
The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) reported more than 100,000 people in the US, 60 years and older, lost $3.4 billion total to digital scams. The IC3 pointed out that the elderly are half as likely to report a loss. So the actual crimes and losses are probably much higher.
In contrast, the total ransomware payouts last year from reporting companies was $1.1 billion according to Chainanalysis. While the total number of fraud reports to the IC3 appears to have leveled off after years of growth, elder fraud increased by 14 percent year on year.
“Combatting the financial exploitation of those over 60 years of age continues to be a priority of the FBI,” wrote FBI Assistant Director Michael D. Nordwall, who leads the Bureau’s Criminal Investigative Division, in the report. “Along with our partners, we continually work to aid victims and to identify and investigate the individuals and criminal organizations that perpetrate these schemes and target the elderly.”
Who is vulnerable?
There are many themes arising for the RSA Conference next week including tools and services to protect against originating with unsecured third parties in the supply chain. That is a crucial issue in every industry especially with almost every company doing business with a supplier in the cloud. But the scope of the problem is almost impossible to resolve. The reasons are myriad.
With every Fortune 1000 business and government agency doing business with tens of thousands of third-party suppliers, the odds of finding one chink in the security protocols are very good for the criminals and state actors looking to do damage.
Social engineering can easily bypass the strongest technical defenses. It only takes a single lapse in digital hygiene to open the door to man-in-the-middle attacks, invite malware injections, and launch credential stuffing. It is also the favorite strategy of ransomware gangs.
Ransomware grabs headlines and remains highly lucrative for ransomware gangs. When compared to other forms of cybercrime, however, ransomware is really a minor issue. There are more than 33 million small businesses (under $100 million in revenue) operating in the United States alone representing 99 percent of all businesses. However, according to a study produced by the Black Kite Research and Intelligence Team, less than 5000 of them experienced a successful ransomware attack in the last 12 months...
Our current election season faces the same problems as in 2016 and 2020. Foreign adversaries are interfering with the election process. This time we know it’s happening we know where it’s coming from and we have ways of dealing with it. The question is, is it enough?
In a world awash in AI-generated, intentional misinformation and urban myths, would you bet your job on the reliability of the information you want to share? You might be betting someone’s life on it.
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A recent study performed by Synthedia has found that consumers are, by and large, ambivalent over the value and threatsmore
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Data for All by John K. Thompson
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Vishing, short for “voice phishing,” is on the rise again.…
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