Month: May 2022

There’s an entire supply chain economy behind cyber crime. Here’s a report by CrowdStrike that shows how cyber crime groups are connected and operate.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-chart-shows-the-connections-between-cybercrime-groups/

Clickbait is an article with content that is completely unrelated to it’s interesting title. This is a common way for cybercriminals to use large scale media platforms to distribute disinformation to confuse and mislead audiences.

Content could be:

Fabricated: completely untrue.
Imposter: pretending to be from a reliable source.
Misleading: presents content in a misleading way.
Manipulated: images or video that has been edited or distorted.
Context by Connection: Content that contains both facts and untrue information.
Satire or Parody: Funny or exaggerated stories that may be used to fool readers.

Always:

• Consider the reliability of the source and author. Where, when and from whom was the information retrieved from?
• Fact-Check the information that you see and educate yourself on the subject. You can use fact-checking sites such as FactCheck.org, PolitiFact.com, or Snopes.com to check the validity of content that you find.
• Only consume news from mainstream news sources.

In 2016, a group of robbers broke into Kim Kardashian West’s hotel room, bound and gagged her, and made off with more than $10 million of jewellery. Months later in 2017, police arrested 10 individuals allegedly involved in the obbery, including mastermind Aomar Ait Khedache.

In an interview, Khedache revealed that he and his cohorts had targetted Kardashian West after she posted photos of her jewelry collection and updates about her trip to Paris for fashion week on social media.

“The jewels were shown on the internet, and she said that she didn’t wear fakes. She shared the time she would arrive in France. You just had to look at the internet and you knew everything. Absolutely everything.”

Using this information, along with data from social media accounts associated with Kardashian West’s family and friends travelling with her, the theives were able to determine the best time to strike – when she was at the hotel alone after telling her bodyguard to accompany her sisters to a club for the eveniong.

The robbery triggered a brief break from social media for Kardashian West, as well as changes to how she now uses social media, including posting about her activities only after she has left the location.

Microsoft recently announced legal action against domains that impersonate the brand using homoglyphs. A homoglyph is a letter or character that closely resembles another letter or character. Cybercriminals use homoglyphs to trick you into thinking a domain belongs to a trusted company.
Here’s an example: Scammers could use a zero (0) in place of a capital letter “O” or they could use a lowercase letter “L” in place of a capital letter “i”. Using these examples, the bad guys can impersonate SINGPOST.COM as SINGP0ST.COM. Some cybercriminals take this method one step further by using characters from other languages. For example, the Russian character “Ь” could be used in place of an English letter “b”.
Remember the tips below:

• Be cautious when you receive an email that you were not expecting. This trick can be used to impersonate any company, brand, or even a person’s name.
• Before you click, always hover over a link to preview the destination, even if you think the email is legitimate. Pay close attention to the characters in the URL.
• If you’re asked to log in to an account or an online service, navigate to the official website and log in there. That way, you can ensure you’re logging in to the real website and not a phony look-alike website.
• A properly operating password manager will not automatically fill in your password on an impersonated website.