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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Based on an INTERPOL survey, West African cybercriminals stole an average of US$2.7 million from businesses and an average of US$422,000 from individuals from 2013 to 2015. Scams, whether simple (like 419 or Nigerian prince scams) or complex (like business email compromise [BEC] scams), run rampant in the West African threat landscape. In fact, most of the online scams we see now may have to do with the increase in the region’s cybercriminal activity volume.
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To answer the question we posed before: Yes, cybercriminals and terrorists are more similar than we think – they use similar platforms and services online, but also with some key differences.
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