Cybercriminals will increasingly target the esports industry over the next three years. Many underground forums already have sections dedicated to gaming or esports sales, and the goods and services offered in these forums generate a lot of interest.
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We uncovered personally identifiable information (PII) stolen from a China-based hotel chain being sold on a deep web forum we were monitoring. Further analysis revealed that the stolen data was not only the PII of Chinese customers, but also included the hotel chain’s customers from Western and East Asian countries. The sample data we saw was unencrypted (in plaintext), some of which were in CSV, SQL, and TXT dumps.
We believe this stolen data is related to the data breach (reported on August 29) that exposed up to 130 million PII. The news that reported the data breach matched with an advertisement we saw in the dark web selling the stolen data for eight bitcoins (equivalent to more than US$58,000 as of September 5, 2018).
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With the increasing popularity and real-world use of cryptocurrencies and the fact that cybercriminals will always try to exploit something that can make money for them, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that malware targeting Bitcoin ATMs have started appearing in underground markets.
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For $50, one could purportedly get a lifetime license to upgradeable variants of WannaCry. We saw this advertisement in an Arabic-speaking underground forum on May 14, two days after WannaCry’s outbreak. Indeed, a threat that left a trail of significant damage in its wake was objectified into a commodity, and even a starting point for others to launch their own cybercriminal businesses.
WannaCry’s relatively low price also reflects another unique aspect of the Middle Eastern and North African underground: a sense of brotherhood. Unlike marketplaces in Russia and North America, for instance, where its players aim to make a profit, the Middle East and North Africa’s underground scene is an ironic juncture where culture, ideology, and cybercrime meet.
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The fraudulent redemption of freebies, discounts, and rebates in the form of coupons is reportedly costing U.S. businesses $300–600 million every year. And where there’s money to be made, there are cybercriminals rustling up schemes to take advantage of it. Unsurprisingly, that was the case when it comes to coupon fraud, which we found to be rife and thriving in the underground.
What does coupon fraud mean for businesses? In 2012, major manufacturers were victimized by counterfeit coupons, with one consumer goods corporation pegging its losses to around $1.28 million. Another coupon fraud scheme almost a decade in the making stole at least $250 million from companies.
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