Cyber Gangs: Who Are They in 2021 and What Do They Want?

Cyber crime gangs are working for years, but lately, theyrsquo;t altered tactics. Theyrsquo;ve adopted new technology, exploited fresh opportunities, delivered fresh payloads and sought out new goals. Their objective is to maximize the amount of money that they can collect through cyber crime.

Gangs, for example Cosmic Lynx, Exaggerated Lion, Fin7 and Florentine Banker, are becoming significant threats. Cyber crime gangs are becoming smarter, increasingly basing their operations in countries beyond the legal reach of their aims. That lets them engage in long-term attacks and keep using them later discovery. Theyrsquo;re banding together more than previously. And theyrsquo;re combining crimes — as an instance, ransomware and extortion.

Theyrsquo;re also seizing new opportunities faster. For instance, cyber crime gangs started to exploit the spike this past year in the amount of people working and being educated remotely. Since lots of these alterations were unplanned, the cyber criminal organizations saw a chance. Some gangs are using typo-squatting and URL Forged to imitate popular video conferencing software. From there, they can take advantage of the fact that millions of people in business and education are unfamiliar with these programs.

Getting the World By Surprise

All cyber attacks seek a portion of surprise, but contemporary threat actors are becoming better at faking authenticity. Some use valid services for part of the scam.

In the past year or two, criminal gangs have set up legitimate-looking sites. They can also open social networking accounts utilized just for social engineering. Theyrsquo;re able to deeply research aims to execute more sophisticated attacks.

A brand new whaling technique requires the research-intensive process of learning all about a target through their social networking articles.  (Whaling is a magic attack on a big target, like a CEO.)  The gang might study those articles for months. Afterward, the hazard actor impersonates someone known to the target and also invites their victim to share a document in an online office package program. Once accessed, this doc opens a distant HTML platform requesting the person to sign into that office package. When they perform, the gang will get access to all their files, emails, calendars and contacts. The sufferer frequently doesn’t understand they’ve ever been attacked until much later. Those attacks can demand catastrophic ransomware strikes , data theft, extortion or stealing cash.

Cosmetic Espionage Targets ‘Whales’ 

A cyber gang named The Florentine Banker stole countless U.K.-based private equity firms by using individual, longterm and disciplined methods. The team could begin their assault from whaling via manipulated email a small number of senior employees until somebody could be duped into revealing their qualifications. From this advantage, they’d then phish others using financial data within the companies, gaining access to their emails and tracking them , in some instances, months. The objective of this is to find out and learn the lay of this property before really stealing anything.

Florentine Banker members could begin registering domains similar to the ones used by the aims ’ coworkers. From there, they could begin stealing money in many ways. They could initiate credible asks for wire transfers or intercept valid ones and replace them with account amounts that could divert the funds to the attackers.

Beyond Messy Phishing Emails 

Spelling and grammar could be weapons deployed by cyber gangs. It’s a cliche at this point that Moses adore email phishing or any sort of Business Email Compromise (BEC) effort. It’s a cliche these emails notoriously contain all sorts of grammar, grammar, style and usage errors, largely because target and perpetrator talk different languages. Bad English was, and still isan easy way to spot any sort of deceptive email. But recently, safety researchers have discovered some cyber crime gangs sending fraudulent emails from impeccable English. Some believe that gangs have been hiring professional native-language authors .

Another continuing trend that favors the accelerating evolution of cyber gangs is the commoditization of malwareincluding those who abuse SSH machine identities within their assault approach. Just one SSH key could give attackers complete access to a company ’s applications and data. This technique was designed, and previously used solely by, state-sponsored attackers, but is now available on the darkened web.

Other examples of specialized tools that people set up for general sale about the dark net comprise TrickBot, CryptoSink, Linux Worm and Skidmap.

State Sponsored or Cyber Gangs? It’s Getting Harder To Tell

In preceding years, it had been easier to tell the difference between an assault carried from cyber crime gangs and state-sponsored attackers. The sophistication, scale and duration of cyber attacks from governments frequently dwarfed anything cyber crime gangs could pull off.

But this ’s changing quickly. Cyber gangs are evolving to greater sophistication. And the opposite is also correct. Cyber criminal organizations are developing techniques and tools so complicated theyrsquo;re increasingly being adopted by state-sponsored attackers. Thus, assessing the sophistication of or the tools utilized in an assault no more immediately informs a defender what kind of attacker it had been.

State-sponsored attacks used to have the exclusive advantage of employing the longstanding espionage technique of bribing individuals in person within target organizations. Envision a market at which a spy in a dark coat and fedora meets their nervous target in a poorly lit park late at night. They exchange briefcases, one of which is packed with cash. Coordinated state-sponsored attacks can leverage this kind of old-school spycraft — and they have the cash to do it.

Attempted Cyber Infiltration Started In Person

Now cyber gangs are doing something very similar to state-sponsored actors, and for exactly the same reason. In a really recent case, a cyber gang targeted California automobile company Tesla for what, in the majority of its particulars, was a fairly boring assault. The strategy was supposed to obtain an employee to add malware into Tesla’s internal networks that would propagate widely within the corporation. Afterward the crooks would assault Tesla using a dispersed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack to divert attention from the actual attack, which involved exfiltrating sensitive data and company secrets. Afterward, they’d extort Tesla to pay up or the data will be made public.

This ’s a fairly boring attack. But herersquo;s the most strange part. The gang (allegedly) sent a representative named Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov to physically fly to Nevada. His occupation was to wine and dine and groom an employee, finally offering him $1 million to set up the malware.

Over the next year or two, it will most likely become more and more tricky for defenders to tell when attacks are state sponsored or executed from cyber gangs.

How to Stay One Step Ahead Of Cyber Gangs

Lots of the old methods for discovering breaches and safety events may be obsolete. But, by reviewing policies, training, priorities and tools, organizations can adapt to the new world of cyber gang crime styles.

Educate employees about the dangers of posting any info on social media that might be utilised in a social engineering attack. Don’t automatically trust authentic or authentic-looking invitations, correspondences, and so on. Verify by phone or other means prior to opening anything which arrives through email. Work to secure distant work assignments along with work-from-home toolsand train against ever offering credentials requested on email.

Develop special training for executives, supervisors and other leaders around whaling attacks. Especially, explain to them why they are likely to be targets of quite complex social engineering attacks.

If you can, use artificial intelligence tools that could seek out strange behavior on the community. These could indicate an assault too subtle for individuals to notice.

Stay cautious concerning the cyber hazard . High-dollar bribes make a new motive for employees to help cyber gangs assault your own organization. It’s not enough to look out exclusively for disgruntled employees. Relatedly, set up extra checks and approvals for cash transfers to prevent an internal social engineering sufferer from inadvertently paying crooks.

Don’t Forget The Basics

You need to avoid tools, such as cloud-based office suites, from being accessed with a simple password and username. Set up extra authentication to prevent gangs from gaining access by sneaking passwords and names.

The brand new world of cyber crime is a hard one. The gangs are evolving not just the tools that they use, but the usage of human activity and legitimate instruments to deceive and prevent. The threat is changing, but it could be defended .

The post Cyber Gangs: Who Are They 2021 and What Do They Want? Appeared first on Security Intelligence.

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