Entries Tagged "cybercrime"

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Scam USPS and E-Z Pass Texts and Websites

Google has filed a complaint in court that details the scam:

In a complaint filed Wednesday, the tech giant accused “a cybercriminal group in China” of selling “phishing for dummies” kits. The kits help unsavvy fraudsters easily “execute a large-scale phishing campaign,” tricking hordes of unsuspecting people into “disclosing sensitive information like passwords, credit card numbers, or banking information, often by impersonating well-known brands, government agencies, or even people the victim knows.”

These branded “Lighthouse” kits offer two versions of software, depending on whether bad actors want to launch SMS and e-commerce scams. “Members may subscribe to weekly, monthly, seasonal, annual, or permanent licenses,” Google alleged. Kits include “hundreds of templates for fake websites, domain set-up tools for those fake websites, and other features designed to dupe victims into believing they are entering sensitive information on a legitimate website.”

Google’s filing said the scams often begin with a text claiming that a toll fee is overdue or a small fee must be paid to redeliver a package. Other times they appear as ads—­sometimes even Google ads, until Google detected and suspended accounts—­luring victims by mimicking popular brands. Anyone who clicks will be redirected to a website to input sensitive information; the sites often claim to accept payments from trusted wallets like Google Pay.

Posted on November 20, 2025 at 7:07 AM • View Comments

Generative AI as a Cybercrime Assistant

Anthropic reports on a Claude user:

We recently disrupted a sophisticated cybercriminal that used Claude Code to commit large-scale theft and extortion of personal data. The actor targeted at least 17 distinct organizations, including in healthcare, the emergency services, and government and religious institutions. Rather than encrypt the stolen information with traditional ransomware, the actor threatened to expose the data publicly in order to attempt to extort victims into paying ransoms that sometimes exceeded $500,000.

The actor used AI to what we believe is an unprecedented degree. Claude Code was used to automate reconnaissance, harvesting victims’ credentials, and penetrating networks. Claude was allowed to make both tactical and strategic decisions, such as deciding which data to exfiltrate, and how to craft psychologically targeted extortion demands. Claude analyzed the exfiltrated financial data to determine appropriate ransom amounts, and generated visually alarming ransom notes that were displayed on victim machines.

This is scary. It’s a significant improvement over what was possible even a few years ago.

Read the whole Anthropic essay. They discovered North Koreans using Claude to commit remote-worker fraud, and a cybercriminal using Claude “to develop, market, and distribute several variants of ransomware, each with advanced evasion capabilities, encryption, and anti-recovery mechanisms.”

Posted on September 4, 2025 at 7:06 AM • View Comments

Cloudflare Reports that Almost 7% of All Internet Traffic Is Malicious

6.8%, to be precise.

From ZDNet:

However, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks continue to be cybercriminals’ weapon of choice, making up over 37% of all mitigated traffic. The scale of these attacks is staggering. In the first quarter of 2024 alone, Cloudflare blocked 4.5 million unique DDoS attacks. That total is nearly a third of all the DDoS attacks they mitigated the previous year.

But it’s not just about the sheer volume of DDoS attacks. The sophistication of these attacks is increasing, too. Last August, Cloudflare mitigated a massive HTTP/2 Rapid Reset DDoS attack that peaked at 201 million requests per second (RPS). That number is three times bigger than any previously observed attack.

It wasn’t just Cloudflare that was hit by the largest DDoS attack in its history. Google Cloud reported the same attack peaked at an astonishing 398 million RPS. So, how big is that number? According to Google, Google Cloud was slammed by more RPS in two minutes than Wikipedia saw traffic during September 2023.

Posted on July 17, 2024 at 12:03 PM • View Comments

The Justice Department Took Down the 911 S5 Botnet

The US Justice Department has dismantled an enormous botnet:

According to an indictment unsealed on May 24, from 2014 through July 2022, Wang and others are alleged to have created and disseminated malware to compromise and amass a network of millions of residential Windows computers worldwide. These devices were associated with more than 19 million unique IP addresses, including 613,841 IP addresses located in the United States. Wang then generated millions of dollars by offering cybercriminals access to these infected IP addresses for a fee.

[…]

This operation was a coordinated multiagency effort led by law enforcement in the United States, Singapore, Thailand, and Germany. Agents and officers searched residences, seized assets valued at approximately $30 million, and identified additional forfeitable property valued at approximately $30 million. The operation also seized 23 domains and over 70 servers constituting the backbone of Wang’s prior residential proxy service and the recent incarnation of the service. By seizing multiple domains tied to the historical 911 S5, as well as several new domains and services directly linked to an effort to reconstitute the service, the government has successfully terminated Wang’s efforts to further victimize individuals through his newly formed service Clourouter.io and closed the existing malicious backdoors.

The creator and operator of the botnet, YunHe Wang, was arrested in Singapore.

Three news articles.

Posted on June 7, 2024 at 7:04 AM • View Comments

How Criminals Are Using Generative AI

There’s a new report on how criminals are using generative AI tools:

Key Takeaways:

  • Adoption rates of AI technologies among criminals lag behind the rates of their industry counterparts because of the evolving nature of cybercrime.
  • Compared to last year, criminals seem to have abandoned any attempt at training real criminal large language models (LLMs). Instead, they are jailbreaking existing ones.
  • We are finally seeing the emergence of actual criminal deepfake services, with some bypassing user verification used in financial services.

Posted on May 9, 2024 at 12:05 PM • View Comments

The Hacker Tool to Get Personal Data from Credit Bureaus

The new site 404 Media has a good article on how hackers are cheaply getting personal information from credit bureaus:

This is the result of a secret weapon criminals are selling access to online that appears to tap into an especially powerful set of data: the target’s credit header. This is personal information that the credit bureaus Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion have on most adults in America via their credit cards. Through a complex web of agreements and purchases, that data trickles down from the credit bureaus to other companies who offer it to debt collectors, insurance companies, and law enforcement.

A 404 Media investigation has found that criminals have managed to tap into that data supply chain, in some cases by stealing former law enforcement officer’s identities, and are selling unfettered access to their criminal cohorts online. The tool 404 Media tested has also been used to gather information on high profile targets such as Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and even President Joe Biden, seemingly without restriction. 404 Media verified that although not always sensitive, at least some of that data is accurate.

Posted on September 7, 2023 at 7:09 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.