A Little Sunshine

IndependentKrebs

LinkedIn Adds Verified Emails, Profile Creation Dates

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Fri, 04 Nov 2022 21:09:52 +0000

For whatever reason, the majority of the phony LinkedIn profiles reviewed by this author have involved young women with profile photos that appear to be generated by artificial intelligence (AI) tools. We’re seeing rapid advances in AI-based synthetic image generation technology and we’ve created a deep learning model to better catch profiles made with this technology. AI-based image generators can create an unlimited number of unique, high-quality profile photos that do not correspond to real people. Fake accounts sometimes use these convincing, AI-generated profile photos to make their fake LinkedIn profile appear more authentic.

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IndependentKrebs

Hacker Charged With Extorting Online Psychotherapy Service

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Thu, 03 Nov 2022 14:43:22 +0000

A 25-year-old Finnish man has been charged with extorting a once popular and now-bankrupt online psychotherapy company and its patients. Finnish authorities rarely name suspects in an investigation, but they were willing to make an exception for Julius “Zeekill” Kivimaki, a notorious hacker who — at the tender age of 17 — had been convicted of more than 50,000 cybercrimes, including data breaches, payment fraud, operating botnets, and calling in bomb threats.

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IndependentKrebs

Accused ‘Raccoon’ Malware Developer Fled Ukraine After Russian Invasion

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2022 20:53:27 +0000

A 26-year-old Ukrainian man is awaiting extradition to the United States on charges that he acted as a core developer for Raccoon, a “malware-as-a-service” offering that helped paying customers steal passwords and financial data from millions of cybercrime victims. KrebsOnSecurity has learned that the defendant was busted in March 2022, after fleeing mandatory military service in Ukraine in the weeks following the Russian invasion.

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IndependentKrebs

Battle with Bots Prompts Mass Purge of Amazon, Apple Employee Accounts on LinkedIn

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2022 17:07:34 +0000

On October 10, 2022, there were 576,562 LinkedIn accounts that listed their current employer as Apple Inc. The next day, half of those profiles no longer existed. A similarly dramatic drop in the number of LinkedIn profiles claiming employment at Amazon comes as LinkedIn is struggling to combat a significant uptick in the creation of fake employee accounts that pair AI-generated profile photos with text lifted from legitimate users.

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IndependentKrebs

Anti-Money Laundering Service AMLBot Cleans House

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2022 14:08:59 +0000

AMLBot, a service that helps businesses avoid transacting with cryptocurrency wallets that have been sanctioned for cybercrime activity, said an investigation published by KrebsOnSecurity last year helped it shut down three dark web services that secretly resold its technology to help cybercrooks avoid detection by anti-money laundering systems.

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IndependentKrebs

Report: Big U.S. Banks Are Stiffing Account Takeover Victims

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Fri, 07 Oct 2022 18:46:12 +0000

When U.S. consumers have their online bank accounts hijacked and plundered by hackers, U.S. financial institutions are legally obligated to reverse any unauthorized transactions as long as the victim reports the fraud in a timely manner. But new data released this week suggests that for some of the nation’s largest banks, reimbursing account takeover victims has become more the exception than the rule.

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IndependentKrebs

Glut of Fake LinkedIn Profiles Pits HR Against the Bots

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Wed, 05 Oct 2022 21:20:53 +0000

A recent proliferation of phony executive profiles on LinkedIn is creating something of an identity crisis for the business networking site, and for companies that rely on it to hire and screen prospective employees. The fabricated LinkedIn identities — which pair AI-generated profile photos with text lifted from legitimate accounts — are creating major headaches for corporate HR departments and for those managing invite-only LinkedIn groups.

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IndependentKrebs

Fake CISO Profiles on LinkedIn Target Fortune 500s

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2022 20:52:43 +0000

Someone has recently created a large number of fake LinkedIn profiles for Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) roles at some of the world’s largest corporations. It’s not clear who’s behind this network of fake CISOs or what their intentions may be. But the fabricated LinkedIn identities are confusing search engine results for CISO roles at major companies, and they are being indexed as gospel by various downstream data-scraping sources.

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