by kiiniaew » Sat Feb 17, 2018 9:59 am
I'm not sure what they done exactly in this case. Over the years I have read about various operations:
- Blackmail: put a naked women/man in front of a cam and record the mark while he is naked, then tell him to wire money or the recording will be published online.
- Scam/Fraud: impersonate police or government and convince the mark of being liable to pay some type of fine.
Impersonate a bank or other financial institution and obtain online banking details. Once received clean out their accounts. (some banks still use a username/password combination without any 2-factor auth like SMS)
Let the mark believe they did win some kind of price however claiming it will incur some costs which have to be paid up front.
Etc.
Not really cybercrime, the only "cyber" involved is that most phone/video calls are placed over VOIP to spoof the numbers / hide the origin of the caller. Obviously they failed in the latter.
Sure they make some money but it is easy to track them and thus we see these arrests over and over again. If they were true cybercriminals they were more wealthy and free. CryptoMining (uploading some code and stealing CPU/GPU power to mine cryptocurrencies), Ransomware (encrypting a victim it's system/files) and Denial of Service (taking down / slowing down a system) are equally simple to pull off with a higher degree of anonymity.
The biggest money is made by being a hacker for hire to carry out targeted attacks on businesses or developing the tools (malware, exploits, av detection bypass, etc.)
I'm not sure what they done exactly in this case. Over the years I have read about various operations:
- Blackmail: put a naked women/man in front of a cam and record the mark while he is naked, then tell him to wire money or the recording will be published online.
- Scam/Fraud: impersonate police or government and convince the mark of being liable to pay some type of fine.
Impersonate a bank or other financial institution and obtain online banking details. Once received clean out their accounts. (some banks still use a username/password combination without any 2-factor auth like SMS)
Let the mark believe they did win some kind of price however claiming it will incur some costs which have to be paid up front.
Etc.
Not really cybercrime, the only "cyber" involved is that most phone/video calls are placed over VOIP to spoof the numbers / hide the origin of the caller. Obviously they failed in the latter.
Sure they make some money but it is easy to track them and thus we see these arrests over and over again. If they were true cybercriminals they were more wealthy and free. CryptoMining (uploading some code and stealing CPU/GPU power to mine cryptocurrencies), Ransomware (encrypting a victim it's system/files) and Denial of Service (taking down / slowing down a system) are equally simple to pull off with a higher degree of anonymity.
The biggest money is made by being a hacker for hire to carry out targeted attacks on businesses or developing the tools (malware, exploits, av detection bypass, etc.)