Massive breach on online credentials

September 20, 2017
fraud prevention and detection

After Equifax What’s Next

The rampant carnage of cybercriminals on your private information does not end with Equifax which is unfortunate for law-abiding businesses and casual users of the internet. Why? Because such crimes are still ongoing, and this will not be easily stopped.

Fraud-Prevention-izoologic

 

What happened?

Fresh from the shelves of Switzerland the Reporting and Analysis Centre for Information Assurance which is their cybercrime center received reports and copies of stolen data from a classified source. According to their cybercrime monitoring center that about thousands of online credentials which includes personal details and passwords used in accessing online services such as email addresses were stolen and then used for criminal activities.

 

Criminal Activities Such As?

  • Blackmail
  • Phishing
  • Fraud

Blackmail – using a legitimate stolen credentials, the criminal can pretend to be the real user of the account and sends an email to ask for “ransom” whether it be monetary or non-monetary..

Phishing- stolen corporate/business credentials would make it easier for criminals to phish and get more credentials than ever. How? Just take a look at this screenshot!

 

 

Something like the image above, or worse a ransomware executable file attached to an email message coming from a business email address.

Fraud:- Using social engineering techniques, they can trick businesses such as suppliers and buyers to send money for a “deal”. One example would be Facebook and Google were once victims of a $100 million dollar phishing attack, which the respective employees were tricked into sending money to overseas bank accounts.

Going back to Switzerland, additional reports suggest that people, in general, are not yet prepared until now to perform fraud prevention and detection and counter as well as avoid such cybercrimes. Most probably people around the world are still vulnerable to such attacks. It is also noted that there were over 200 IP addresses that got affected by WannaCryransomware which affected major organizations operations.

 

Most Vulnerable Devices?

Most malware such as ransomware is deployed and activated on computers run by Windows operating system, which makes it one of the most vulnerable devices that can easily be affected by cyber-attacks.

Swiss scientists developed new countermeasures to protect both businesses and individuals from massive infection of recent Ransomware attacks. However, there are other cyber-attacks that we have to look at where protection lies beyond what the government and authorities can protect you from.

Android devices come in second place in my opinion, because it is easy to study on how to code and deploy apps on those devices.

 

How to Secure Yourself?

For business owners it is vital to protect your brand i.e fraud prevention and detection because cybercriminals can easily spoof your business email addresses or use a similar email name under a service provider, and ransomware can be deployed via websites that force functions a file download which they can imitate your brand to convince unsuspecting users on downloading ransomware files on that similar web page of yours. As a result, your company can be blamed by the affected people and thus destroy your reputation and impact your business financially in the long run.

It would be wise to employ Brand Protection monitoring services such as Brand, Domain, Mobile App monitoring to monitor for potential abuse which could eventually be taken down through a site takedown procedure, before it victimizes a lot of people that your brand caters. Protect your brand before you receive a lot of negative reviews. The internet can be cruel by making you viral in either positive or negative way, and you don’t want the negative impact, right?

About the author

Leave a Reply