News of the Cyber World

[kyonides]

FTC says Americans are losing more money
to social media fraud than ever before

Losses from fraud originating on social media skyrocketed in 2021, according to data the Federal Trade Commission released Thursday.

More than 95,000 individuals reported losses totaling $770 million as a result of fraud initiated on social media. That number is up from $258 million in 2020 and just $42 million in 2017.

Part of that growth has been driven by record losses to cryptocurrency scams. Investment scams made up 37% of all reported fraud losses originating on social media in 2021, according to Thursday’s report.

Scammers have found a wide range of ways to dupe cryptocurrency investors, such as so-called “giveaway” scams where victims are told to send in money for a large investment return that never appears. Those scams have popped up quickly after surges in popularity of a new coin and even with focused efforts, social media platforms have struggled to stop them.

The FTC in March 2021 reported a significant increase in cryptocurrency investment scams with victims reporting nearly $80 million in losses between October 2020 and March 2021 alone. Victims are often unable to recoup losses from these scams.

The largest number of reports, however, traced back to online shopping scams where fraudsters advertised misleading or nonexistent products on social media.

“In nearly 70% of these reports, people said they placed an order, usually after seeing an ad, but never got the merchandise,” the FTC reports. “Some reports even described ads that impersonated real online retailers that drove people to lookalike websites.”

Nearly nine out of 10 reports named Facebook or Instagram as the source in their reports of undelivered goods.
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Such scams have also proliferated on other social media platforms, including TikTok and YouTube, as security firm Tenable has noted.

Ransomware group says it took files from French Ministry of Justice

A ransomware group claimed Thursday that it stole thousands of files from the French Ministry of Justice, threatening to post “all available data” if the ransom isn’t paid by Feb. 10.

The announcement appeared on the leak site of LockBit 2.0, a known ransomware-as-a-service operation that’s been active since at least September 2019, according to cybersecurity firm Emsisoft.
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A ministry spokesperson told Politico that the agency was “aware of the alert and immediately took steps to carry out the necessary checks,” but did not elaborate.

The post viewed by CyberScoop on the leak site — where victim files are publicized either to pressure payments or punish victims if ransoms aren’t paid — indicates that the group may have 9,856 files, but nothing has been posted yet.

Brett Callow, a threat analyst at Emsisoft, said Thursday that the group may not end up posting any files, “as some of their past claims have been bogus.” For example, he said, there have been cases “where information stolen from organization A included information about organization B, they claim to have hit both A and B.”

Originally known as ABCD ransomware based on the file extension of the files it would encrypt on a target’s system, the ransomware evolved to LockBit and then LockBit 2.0 by June 2021, racking up perhaps tens of thousands of victims globally, Emsisoft reported.

LockBit was reportedly used in the July 2021 ransomware attack on global IT consultant firm Accenture that reportedly came with a $50 million ransom demand, CyberScoop reported at the time.