• CYBERCRIMEIncrease in Chinese-Language Malware Could “Challenge” Russian Dominance of Cybercrime: Report

    By Masood Farivar

    For decades, Russian and eastern European hackers have dominated the cybercrime underworld. These days they may face a challenge from a new contender: China. Researchers have detected an increase in the spread of Chinese language malware through email campaigns since early 2023, signaling a surge in Chinese cybercrime activity and a new trend in the global threat landscape.

  • VOICE AUTHENTICATIONHow Secure Are Voice Authentication Systems Really?

    Voice authentication has increasingly been used in remote banking, call centers and other security-critical scenarios. Attackers can break voice authentication with up to 99 percent success within six tries.

  • CYBERSECURITYNew ‘Faraday Cage’ Research Facility to Help Combat Digital Crime

    University of Huddersfield installing a new facility named the ‘Faraday Cage’ which will help speed-up the development and testing of new digital forensic processes to help law enforcement meet the huge growth rate in digital crime.

  • CYBERSECURITYCyberproofing Small and Medium Businesses -- a Small Step with a Big Impact

    By Bart Hogeveen

    Small businesses are not immune to cybersecurity incidents. In fact, they’re often more vulnerable because they lack the time, resources and sometimes the skills to prepare for and defend against an attack, or to mitigate and remedy any consequences. In Australia, they created a tool to help businesses quickly and easily test the security of their websites.

  • CYBERCRIMEFighting Global Cybercrime

    Cyber threats from across the world⁠—from Russian attempts to influence the war in Ukraine by threatening cyberattacks against the West, to China stealing defense and industrial secrets, to Iran’s 2021 targeting of Children’s Hospital in Boston⁠, thwarted by the FBI — were the focus of recent remarks by FBI Director Christopher Wray.

  • CYBERCRIMEExtradited Kremlin-Linked Russian Businessman Charged with Cybercrimes, along with Four Other Russian Suspects

    Russian businessman Vladislav Klyushin was extradited from Switzerland to the United States last week over his involvement in a global scheme to trade on hacked confidential information. One of Klyushin’s codefendants, Ivan Ermakov, a former officer in Russia’s GRU military intelligence, was charged in court in 2018 for his role in hacking and disinformation operations the GRU conducted in 2016 as part of Russia’s interference in the U.S. presidential elections.

  • ARGUMENT: Strengthening cybersecurityThe Van Buren Decision Is Good News for Cybersecurity

    In June, after years of uncertainty, the Supreme Court finally shed some light on the meaning of a notoriously vague law, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Timothy Edgar writes that one problem with CFAA was that some courts had interpreted the CFAA’s language so broadly. Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s technically informed opinion, which narrowed the scope of CFAA, was a win for civil liberties — and also a victory — not a loss — for cybersecurity. Moreover, Barrett’s opinion “offers a model for how to interpret computer crime laws.”

  • CybercrimeCybercrime a Booming Business — Thanks to COVID

    By Marcel Fürstenau

    The coronavirus pandemic has given a huge boost to internet crime. The number of offenses is on the rise while the number of successfully solved cases is stagnating in Germany. Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) registered 108,474 cybercrimes in its latest annual report. That is an increase of nearly 8% on the previous year.

  • Cybercrime2020 Cybercrime Losses Exceeded $4.2 Billion: FBI

    The FBI’s 2020 Internet Crime Report includes information from 791,790 complaints of suspected internet crime—an increase of more than 300,000 complaints from 2019—and reported losses exceeding $4.2 billion.

  • PerspectiveThe Department of Defense Should Not Wage Cyber War Against Criminal Hackers During the Coronavirus Crisis

    Politicians and pundits in the United States have frequently described the challenge of controlling the COVID pandemic with the language of waging war. Erica D. Borghard writes that given this terminology, it can be tempting to look to the Department of Defense (DOD) to solve problems it was not meant to address. While nefarious actors in cyberspace are seeking to capitalize on scared and vulnerable individuals during the pandemic for criminal gain and national strategic objectives, “any efforts to leverage DOD capabilities in combating these efforts must distinguish between nation-state and criminal activity,” she writes.

  • Cyberattacks & the economyHow Bad Are Cyberattacks for the Economy? Assessing the Damage

    Anna Scherbina, an associate professor of finance at Brandeis International Business School, served from 2017 to 2019 as a senior economist on the White House Council of Economic Advisers, where, among other things, she wrote the chapter on cybersecurity in the 2018 Economic Report of the President. She drew particular attention to data breaches and concluded with her colleagues that malicious cyber activity cost the U.S. economy between $57 billion and $109 billion in 2016, or upwards of 0.58 percent of gross domestic product.

  • CybercrimeTo Tackle Cybercrime We First Need to Understand It

    What can we do about cybercrime? To answer that, you need to understand it. Oxford University’s Jonathan Lusthaus has spent the last seven years researching the hidden details of cybercrime. His book on the subject, Industry of Anonymity, has just been published.

  • Organized cybercrimeOrganized Cybercrime: Not Your Grandfather’s Mafia

    Does the common stereotype for “organized crime” hold up for organizations of hackers? New research is one of the first to identify common attributes of cybercrime networks, revealing how these groups function and work together to cause an estimated $445-600 billion of harm globally per year.

  • CyberforensicsCyber toolkit for criminal investigations

    cybercrimes reached a six-year high in 2017, when more than 300,000 people in the United States fell victim to such crimes. Losses topped $1.2 billion. Cybercriminals can run, but they cannot hide from their digital fingerprints.

  • CybersecurityDark web marketplace for SSL and TLS certificates

    A thriving marketplace for SSL and TLS certificates—small data files used to facilitate confidential communication between organizations’ servers and their clients’ computers—exists on a hidden part of the internet.