The Risks of Using Corporate Emails for Personal Services
Everyday, Flare Systems collects leaked usernames and passwords on the internet and the darkweb. Our customers use our extensive leaked credentials database to prevent credential stuffing attacks. Credential stuffing happens when malicious actors take a database of leaked usernames and passwords and test these credentials on a different website. If the victims reused the […]
Do You Speak Fraudster?
We updated this article on August 3, 2023 to include fraudster terms from Telegram. To improve our tools and algorithms, part of our daily work at Flare is to read advertisements for illicit goods and services in illicit communities such as dark web forums and marketplaces. Our job is to understand who the threat actors […]
How are Canadian Fraudsters Taking Advantage of the COVID-19 Pandemic?
How are Canadian Fraudsters Taking Advantage of the COVID-19 Pandemic? When disasters hit, fraudsters are usually quick to take advantage of the situation and especially of the most vulnerable. The COVID-19 pandemic appears to trigger many types of fraud converging into a pattern that has become all too familiar. Recently, the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre issued […]
What Passwords Do Fraudsters Use?
Five years ago, Avast published a blog post that analyzed a database of 2,000 passwords used by hackers. It found that hackers use very easy to crack passwords just like most people. In fact, their most common password was hack! In this blog post, we follow-up on our previous post on 46M cracked passwords. This […]
Aftermath of the Takedown of a Major Carding Kingpin
We explained in a previous blog where stolen data goes. Last week, Brian Krebs reported that the Russians had shut down a huge card fraud ring. The FSB (Russian Federal Police) arrested 25 individuals connected with 90 online illicit markets. These websites specialized in the sale of stolen financial information. This provides us with a […]
News Release: Flare Systems and Donahoe Advisory Group Announce Partnership to Provide Engagement Services in USA and Canada
March 31st 2020, Montreal Flare Systems, a leading provider of fraud prevention and digital risk protection solutions for financial institutions, and Donahoe Advisory Group (DAG), today announced the availability of a combined offering to enable Donahoe Advisory to provide professional cybersecurity services and leading-edge cyber security workshops and engagements to a wide range of industries. […]
Where Does Stolen Data Go?
The recent indictment of 4 Chinese nationals gives us an opportunity to talk about a topic that touches all the companies that have had the personal or account information they protect stolen: Where does stolen data go? The script kiddie Script kiddies are young, unsophisticated malicious actors. They purchase tools or download free ones […]
The Truth Behind Joker’s Stash / Wawa Announcement
Over the past two weeks, all the leading news agency have reported that the millions of credit cards stolen at Wawa’s stores in the United States in 2019 have been put on sale on the dark web. While accurate in many ways, the news reports would benefit from a few corrections. Wawa’s stolen cards have […]
Trying Too Hard to Attract Buyers Can Backfire
Malicious actors face a difficult task in online illicit markets. How can they convince others that they are offering a high quality service (ex. selling stolen credit card numbers) without exposing themselves to arrest or providing their victims (ex. financial institutions) with enough information to prevent further victimization? This blog post investigates how malicious actors […]
46M Cracked Passwords – Are People Getting Better at Securing Their Accounts?
A little over a year ago, malicious actors hacked the MyFitnessPal service. With 143 million users, this was one of the largest hack of credentials ever reported. Now, as Flare Systems is launching its leaked passwords check service, we present the three lessons we learned from analyzing this massive throve of passwords. Getting acquainted with […]
