Major Hack Jeopardizes Future of Dark Web Marketplaces
Over the past week, an unknown malicious actor launched perhaps the biggest phishing attack against dark web marketplaces. This attack created havoc among their participants, and further questioned the very business model of dark web marketplaces. What happened, why is it significant, and what does this mean for the near future? The Hacking of Dark […]
Private forums increase transmission of knowledge by malicious actors
Malicious actors use online discussion forums to facilitate the exchange of knowledge, often out of the public’s eye. In this blog, we study the transmission of knowledge that takes place on public and private forums. This leads us to question how the participant selection mechanisms of forums influence the transmission of knowledge. This transmission is […]
Business of Sending Spam
While malicious actors have developed countless attack methods, spam remains to this day a significant threat vector for companies. The most recent statistics on spam are indicative of the danger that spam poses: 95% of all attacks targeting enterprise networks are caused by successful spear phishing. A single spear phishing attack results in an average […]
All Is Fair In Darknet Wars
For anyone trying to collect data on the darknet, the last three years have been an incredible challenge. The dark net used to be a collection of simple marketplaces that could be easily indexed and crawled, though sometimes slowly because of the size of some of the markets. Alpha Bay, for example, had an estimated […]
How online learning may have opened the door for ransomware in higher ed
PYSA ransomware, a variant of Mespinoza ransomware, has been actively targeting the education sector in the past months. According to the FBI, ransomware, malware and DDoS attacks have compromised a number of critical sectors, yet educational institutions in the US and the UK seem to be the preferred target for now. Has online learning triggered […]
F.B.I. Reveals 70% Year-Over-Year Increase in Reported Cybercrime
The F.B.I. has just published its latest report on cybercrime complaints it received in 2020. The picture drawn should raise concerns for most CISOs, and unfortunately raises even more questions than providing answers. The main take-away from the report is that 791,790 cybercrime complaints were made in 2020. Those complaints were responsible for over US$4.2 […]
Renting A Canadian Bot for Less than the Price of Dinner for Two
A botnet is a network of computers infected with malware that allows a malicious actor – the botmaster – to control them remotely. The infected computers – the bots – communicate with a command and control server (C&C) to receive their orders. The use cases for bots are too numerous to list here, but […]
The Criminal Underground: the Last Refuge of Banner Ads
In the 2000s, banner ads became popular notably through Google. The search engine has enabled marketers to reach a vast audience through a standard visual message that fit on any web page. Just like containers for shipping, banner ads were standardized to make it easier to share and post on multiple platforms. While useful for […]
The Mirage of Encrypted Phones, and Why They Fail
In June 2014, the company Silent Circle launched the first version of its Blackphone. This device, running a modified version of Android, promised to reign in difficult to understand privacy and security settings to make it easy to communicate securely. Blackphone users were supposed to be able to make encrypted calls and send encrypted messages […]
The Ins and Outs of Illicit Chat Rooms
Over the past decade, the dark web has attracted much of the attention in the security field as the premier source of threats for companies. Our years of monitoring the dark web have helped better understand what it is, and most importantly, is not. The dark web is host to many dynamic malicious actor communities. […]
