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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
