Hacker Contracts: The Economy Behind Illicit Markets
Malicious actors often rely on each other to launch attacks. A carding ring that was recently dismantled by Russian authorities, for example, led to the arrest of 25 individuals who were working together. Browsing through a popular hacker forum, one can come across hundreds, if not thousands, of advertisements for different hacking tools and services. […]
The Winners and Losers of the Empire Market Shutdown
Updated: November 26th, 2021As the article below is a bit out of date, here’s a breakdown of most of the large changes in the dark web marketplace scene: Empire Market exit scammed in August 2020 DarkMarket was sized in January 2021 Yellow Brick exited a few days after DarkMarket BigBlue was seized by Interpol in April […]
Why all the Spam? How Phishing Emails Get to You
A phishing attack is any communication (email, SMS, instant messaging) campaign launched by a malicious actor to steal personal data and credentials. Phishing attacks are one of the biggest threats to data security. According to a Microsoft report, the frequency of phishing attacks grew by 250% between 2018 and 2019. Phishing has now supplanted malware […]
Ransomware and Supply Chains
Ransomware is a growing threat to any organization, government or business. In Canada alone, it is estimated that ransomware attacks and the associated downtime cost our economy CAD$2.4 billion in 2020. HOW RANSOMWARE ATTACKS WORK Spread as malware through emails and insecure download links, ransomware programs embed themselves in the computer systems of firms. Ransomware […]
Credential Stuffing Attacks And CRA
The Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) is an essential part of the Canadian Federal Government response to the COVID-19 pandemic. With an estimated cost of over $71 billion dollars and limited vetting of applicants, the CERB program has been known to be vulnerable to fraud since launch. Since the program’s launch, media outlets have reported that between 200,000 […]
5 Trends in Loyalty Program Fraud in Canada
Loyalty programs have grown tremendously in the last decade. Memberships rose to 3.8 billion members recently , with a total value of USD$323 billion for the ecosystem. Loyalty program fraud has significantly increased as well, increasing by 89% in the first quarter of 2019 alone. We previously explored how loyalty program fraud happens. To […]
How Loyalty Program Fraud Happens
Loyalty programs have grown tremendously in the last decade. Memberships rose from 2.6 billion to 3.8 billion from 2012 to 2016, and are projected to increase to 5.5 billion by the end of the year. The total value of all loyalty program points was estimated at USD$48 billion in 2017 (Wise Marketer, 2017). This rapid […]
What Does the “Free” in Free Food Really Mean?
Hijacked accounts are one of the most common items available for purchase on online illicit markets. On our blog, we’ve discussed in the past the issue of bank credentials being put up for sale. We now want to highlight how fraudsters also target other industries – namely the food delivery industry. This has been […]
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 […]
