The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/category/cybercrime/)
A software writer’s guilty plea in Las Vegas on Friday to charges of RICO conspiracy for helping steal identities, payment cards, and other sensitive data highlights the massive losses incurred in cyberscams, which have increased in scope since the outbreak of COVID-19.
In response to growing concerns about racial bias, IBM, Amazon and Microsoft have all imposed limitations or bans on the selling of facial recognition items to police in the United States.
The Justice Department conceded that the two defendants were not likely appear in a U.S. courtroom.
Russian hackers are targeting organizations involved in COVID-19 vaccine development, according to an alert published Thursday by the UK-based National Cyber Security Centre. The main culprit is said to be APT29, a group also connected to interference in the 2016 U.S. election.
The U.S. experienced 156 significant cyber attacks between 2006 and June 2020, according to a new report. That’s way ahead of the second-ranked most targeted nation — the United Kingdom, at 47.
A U.S. request to extradite a South Korean man described as running one of the world’s biggest child porn sites has been rejected by the Seoul High Court, which ruled that extradition could “hamper” South Korea’s own investigation.
Despite indictments, Russian saboteurs–some linked to the Russian military–have targeted millions of employees of major U.S. firms in a new escalation of East-West cyberwarfare. Chinese and North Korean hackers are also becoming a distributor of “weaponized” social media, according to security experts.
Cybercrime has increased by 300 percent since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — originating mostly from countries “solely” interested in information on the virus — and the FBI expects another surge as businesses tentatively start to reopen.
China, Russia and Iran have seized on the George Floyd killing to promote stories hostile to the United States in their state-owned media, but their efforts stopped short of the type of covert online influence operation attributed to Russia in the 2016 presidential campaign, according to a recent analysis.
U.S. officials are set to issue a warning that hackers in China are attempting to steal American vaccine and treatment research, as more than a dozen countries are reportedly redeploying military and intelligence hackers to learn how other countries are dealing with the coronavirus.