Elder fraud festers out of control

Lou Covey June 21, 2024

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?

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Related: German election: "Responsibility for cyber security remains with the private sector"

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DDoS on X was avoidable, but inevitable

Lou Covey March 17, 2025

The DDoS attack on X.com this week provided a certain amount of schadenfreude for people less than enamored by Elon Musk. It also rang alarm bells in the cybersecurity community as that style of attack seems to be making a comeback, and not for financial gain. All indications are corporations, and, in particular, government institutions are not ready to repel attacks motivated by political revenge.

Security intelligence company Fletch.ai this week identified multiple ongoing attacks around the world targeting corporations for a variety of political positions, depending on which side the entities supported. Issues include the Ukraine/Russia war, Palestine/Israel, immigration, tariffs and just plain political leanings.

Musk blamed Ukrainian hackers for the attack on X (aka Xitter) but because DDoS attacks use multiple servers arrow the globe it is difficult to identify a particular source. However, Fletch and other analysts identify pro-Russian and pro-Chinese hacktivist groups behind most of the attacks using tried-and-true botnets.

Cheap and easy

Mithilesh Ramaswamy, a senior security engineer at Microsoft, said the cost of compute and cloud infrastructure are cheap now creating a low barrier to entry. “Even renting a botnet or using a DDoS-for-hire service is relatively simple and inexpensive.”

Dependency on cloud services also make organizations vulnerable when they rely heavily on third-party services or microservices architectures, he explained, allowing attackers to exploit integration weak points and unleash large-scale disruptions with targeted floods of traffic.

Cloudflare reported blocking a record-breaking 5.6 Tbps DDoS attack carried out by a Mirai-variant botnet. The significant increase in DDoS attacks in 2024, with a 53% rise from the previous year, underscores the growing threat. Fletch reported that the BadBox botnet infected over one million Android devices in 2024 “Despite efforts to disrupt it, the botnet continued to grow, indicating the persistent and evolving nature of DDoS threats.”

A pro-Palestinian hacktivist group known as Dark Storm claimed responsibility for attack on X.com, which caused major outages on the platform over the course of 48 hours. But that claim has not been verified.

Lax security

Ian Thornton-Trump, a well-respected security expert and current CISO for the Inversion6, blamed lax security standards at X.com for the breach. He pointed out that the section of the X.com servers the was hit was not covered by their Cloudflare subscription. Cloudflare is primarily a third-party service that provides a robust protection against DDoS attacks. The rise of these services helped drive the popularity of the attacks down over the past few years, but an organization still has to turn on the protection as they implement new data services. X apparently did not do that.

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