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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Crime follows the money, as the saying goes, and once again, cybercriminals have acted accordingly. The underground is flooded with so many offerings of cryptocurrency malware that it must be hard for the criminals themselves to determine which is best. This kind of malware, also known as cryptomalware, has a clear goal, which is to make money out of cryptocurrency transactions. This can be achieved through two different methods: stealing cryptocurrency and mining cryptocurrency on victims’ devices surreptitiously (without the victims noticing), a process also known as cryptojacking. In this post, we discuss how these two methods work, and see whether devices connected to the internet of things (IoT), which are relatively underpowered, are being targeted.
Read MoreUsing a machine learning system, we analyzed 3 million software downloads, involving hundreds of thousands of internet-connected machines, and provide insights in this three-part blog series. In the first part of this series, we took a closer look at unpopular software downloads and the risks they pose to organizations. We also briefly mentioned the problem regarding code signing abuse, which we will elaborate on in this post.
Code signing is the practice of cryptographically signing software with the intent of giving the operating system (like Windows) an efficient and precise way to discriminate between a legitimate application (like an installer for Microsoft Office) and malicious software. All modern operating systems and browsers automatically verify signatures by means of the concept of a certificate chain.
Valid certificates are issued or signed by trusted certification authorities (CAs), which are backed up by parent CAs. This mechanism relies entirely and strictly on the concept of trust. We assume that malware operators are, by definition, untrustworthy entities. Supposedly, these untrustworthy entities have no access to valid certificates. However, our analysis shows that is not the case.
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In our exploration of the different cybercriminal underground markets, we often note that these black markets are often hard to infiltrate, or even find in the first place. It takes a specific set of skills and knowledge to be able to get inside these underground economies. But not the North American underground. Unlike its counterparts…
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