Cases of illegal matters like Net Banking, ATM hackings, and fraud banking cards rose over 50% to pass more than 52,000 cases in the year 2018, with New Delhi being the banking scams metropolis estimating for approximately 27% of the recorded instances of "theft of money." The Indian Government, however, replies by saying the situation is not that bad as the amount of money stolen in such instances have dropped. Cases of theft related to Netanking, ATMs, and transactions have risen by 50%. But the amount of fraud money involved in these cases has fallen by 12%.


The capital New Delhi amounts for 3,164 complaints registered, top in the list of ATM frauds cities. However, the figures in the public sector ATM frauds are quite staggering. State Bank of India, which has more than 58,000 ATMs throughout the country, has been the victim of 1 out of 5 frauds happening to its ATM. SBI amounts to 25% of the ATM frauds that happened in 2018-19. Following SBI is IDBI Bank, which is second in the list of ATM frauds. According to IDBI's website, the bank has over 3700 ATMs in the country, and it reports 1800 cases of scam. IDBI amounts for 15 % of the ATM heists cases between 2017 and 19.

As of now, the Indian government has not revealed the causes that led to the fraud. The bankers, on the other hand, say that India has been falling prey to banking frauds day by day, at the time when the country is working to develop its infrastructure to protect itself. "The country is observing a large entrance of frauds from alien nations as the support system in Europe has been enhanced, causing more trouble for the fraudsters," says a banker.

Whereas, another banker says that hidden cameras are being planted over the ATM keyboards for spying the pin codes, and different hacking methods like viruses are being deployed by the hackers in the ATMs to steal all the money. The RBI has announced specific measures to control the situation but the banks are very slow in responding to the measures suggested.

A resident of Russia Anna Kozlova, resting in Spain, lost 14 thousand rubles ($220). The money was stolen from her VTB Bank card through the Bank's mobile app and Uber.

At first, the woman was charged 2 rubles from the card, it looked like a standard check of the solvency of Uber customer, especially since the money immediately returned to the account.

However, immediately after this, 2829 rubles were debited from the card. The app’s notification said it was Uber service fee that Anna hadn’t actually used since she was sleeping.
Then notifications, according to the tourist, began to come one after another. After 22 minutes, when she woke up, the girl blocked her card, but by that time the cost of four more trips that she had not made was debited from the card.

Unknown stole from Kozlova 14 118 rubles and did not stop trying to withdraw money from her account even after blocking the card. It is curious that all write-offs were allegedly made by the international service Uber, which in Russia was merged with Yandex.Taxi.

When Anna contacted the support team of this company, the staff could not give her information about the write-offs. The VTB support service clarified that the last write-offs were made from Moscow, and then Anna appealed to Uber Russia.

The Russian company Kozlova explained that if she did not use a taxi, it means that someone received the data of her Bankcard, including CCV code, and used it for payment.
Kaspersky Lab experts explained that fraud schemes through taxi services are no longer uncommon.

According to them, there are channels in the messengers where you can order a taxi at a great discount. The scheme looks something like this: the passenger sends a message to such a channel indicating the details of the trip, and the attacker calls a taxi using the stolen account.

After completing the trip, the driver receives money from the owner of the stolen account, and the passenger transfers the money directly to the attacker. In order to remain unnoticed for as long as possible, attackers can track the owner of a hacked account on social networks and organize such trips at night when it is likely that a person is sleeping, or during the victim’s travel abroad.

Reportedly, accepting the growing need for better cyber-security tactics and embracing a further developed regime for securing the businesses on the cyber front, European organizations are up for upgrading their network security.

With a high rise in the number of cyber-crime, mainly data breaches, and other infamous cyber-attacks it’s become the need of the hour to promote more initiatives regarding data safety.

By taking upon themselves the idea of spending more on modern security techniques and solutions, the European businesses are investing truly in lucrative methods of counteracting cyber-crime.

Along with getting into partnerships with their local governments, network security is one of the major focuses of the organizations with allegedly an expected compound annual growth rate of over 15% by 2025 in the field.

Protecting data integrity, guarding businesses against any virus or malware attacks, stabilizing the critical business networks and shielding against any unwanted intrusions are a few of the major missions.

Network management has indeed become difficult owing it to the technological advancements, multiplication in the variety of devices and intricate network structures and hence network monitoring tools have become imperative.


Long gone are the days of traditional solutions to not so traditional cyber-hazards and cyber-insecurities. Antiquated prevention systems are obviously failing at keeping cyber-crime at bay.

Reportedly, large amounts of random alerts are generated everyday but go unnoticed which leads to “classes of risky connected devices” going without proper monitoring, analyses and management.


Per sources, analysis of network security has got to be of paramount importance to any business that wishes to successfully and safely function in these imminently digital times.

Finding out what the actual threats are, reducing noise, realizing their motives and ultimately being ready for them when (if) they arrive at all is the smartest decision any organization could make.

The banking sector, per reports is one of the leading turfs to become cyber-active and cyber-ready. With all the e-commerce platforms and cyber-banking being a huge part of the digital game the investments are supposed face a gigantic hike in the coming years.

Cyber-attacks have several repercussions to them that they leave behind after wreaking the primary havoc. Financial damages, tarnished images, dissatisfaction between customers, clients and other stakeholders are at the top of the list.

With improved and upgraded cyber-awareness regimes and cyber-security solutions owing it to better analytics, all the enterprises from large to smaller ones shall definitely be more lucrative than ever.

Dmitry Peskov, the Press Secretary for the President of Russia, commenting on the largest award in history appointed for Russian hacker Maxim Yakubets, said that Moscow opposes cross-border persecution of Russians by the American authorities. The State Department announced awards of $5 million for information that would help detain the Russian Maxim Yakubets. American authorities consider this citizen of the Russian Federation the leader of the hacker group Evil Corp.

"The Russian side has repeatedly offered cooperation [in the fight against cybercrime], and our proposals were undesirable and misunderstood," said the Kremlin representative.

According to Peskov, Moscow considers crimes in the cybersphere very serious, the people who committed them should bear the deserved punishment.

"We traditionally advocate for cooperation in the investigation of such crimes and the capture of criminals, but in this case, we can't speak about cooperation, this is not our fault," said the representative of the Kremlin.

On December 5, the US State Department announced its readiness to pay $5 million for information that will help detain the alleged leader of the hacker group Evil Corp (also known as the Dridex Gang) Maxim Yakubets. This award was the largest in history of all that has ever been nominated for the head of a cybercriminal. Earlier, another Russian Evgeny Bogachev was the “leader” in this indicator, for whom in 2015 a prize of $3 million was offered.

Us and UK authorities accuse Yakubets of leading a group of hackers who stole more than $100 million. According to the US Treasury, Evil Corp is responsible for the development and distribution of the malware Dridex, used to infect the computers of 300 banks and financial companies in more than 40 countries.

According to Washington, Yakubets also provided direct assistance to the Russian government. The US Treasury Department claims that Yakubets worked for the FSB of Russia in 2017, and in April 2018 was allegedly in the process of obtaining permission from the FSB to work with Russian secret documents.

Reportedly, Facebook filed a lawsuit against a “Chinese Company” that allegedly put user accounts at large only to put up suspicious ads on the platform.

The running and distribution of advertisements which were about “counterfeit goods” and “dietary pills” was the only purpose of compromising the accounts in question.

The aforementioned company, per reports, goes by the name of “ILikeAD Media International Company Ltd.” It is, according to sources represented by the authors of the malware scheme, namely, "Huang Toa" and "Chen Xiao Cong".

Purportedly, the aforementioned authors apparently employed two basic ploys to mask their actual aim.

Using images of celebrities, aka “celeb bait” to lure people into clicking on them is one of them and the other happens to be something called “Cloaking”.

Cloaking refers to the act of hiding something from the Facebook systems so that the real destination of a link and advertisement is concealed.

The ad after getting clicked on would lead the users to the genuine “landing page” whereas Facebook would be tricked into seeing a version that’s legitimate according to the policies and terms of the advertising policies.

Per Facebook, in most cases, Cloaking is foolproof as it hardly ever leaves tracks behind, making it pretty tough to realize the identity of actors. This majorly happens to be the reason why there are no specific rules about this.


Reportedly, another attack along the same lines was observed when fake PDF file editor was being pushed only to steal Amazon and Facebook session cookies. The malware at work, per reports, goes by the name of “Socelars”.

Along with session cookies, other data like access tokens, email addresses, credit card information, account IDs et cetera have allegedly constituted a part of the compromised data.

The cookies are later on used to link with several Facebook URLs where one among them accesses the “account_billing” directory.

The information allowing users to call a Facebook Graph API and extract data from the users’ Ads Manager settings is the major part of what’s inside the directory.

The malware which was being distributed via numerous websites was in actuality a new “Trojan” which had almost nothing in common with the other types.

There’s no knowing if the above-mentioned malware has anything to do with the organization that Facebook sued but it surely suits the description.

All the users who had fallen prey to the schemes pulled off by the cyber-cons were handsomely compensated for, along with getting their accounts secured and free of any unauthorized access.

Facebook is very well aware of the jeopardy its users almost got into and is all-in for taking precautionary measures to erase any chances of repetition.

Venafi, a company that offers a range of solutions to help financial services companies secure their cryptographic keys and digital certificates, has uncovered over 100,000 URL hijacks with valid TLS ( Transport Layer Security) certificates targeting major retailers.

Venafi conducted an analysis of lookalike domains targeting 20 major retailers, as the festive season is around the corner. The analysis resulted in the discovery of 109,045 typosquatted domains of retailers from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, and France. These use TLS certificates to appear more genuine.
This is more than double from last year and of these only 20,000 certificates were issued for retail.

These URL hijackers targeted 20 dominant retailers from countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, and France. Of the 109,045, nearly 84,000 hijacked US domains with 50,000 copying countries major players. In the UK, Venafi could trace 14,000 fake retail certificates. The typosquatted domains were not limited to the UK and US, but Venafi also discovered 7,000 certificates for fake domains targeting retailers in Germany, 3,500 Australian retailers, and 1,500 targeting French retailers.

Jing Xie, a senior threat intelligence researcher at Venafi said," Some of these URLs probably serve a legitimate purpose, but many may be used by attackers for fraudulent purposes. We think the sheer volume of these sites is a strong indication that a large number of them are being used for malicious purposes, especially since we are so close to the holiday shopping season. " (Sc. SecurityWeek)

He also added, “Although our research did not analyze the specific threats connected with these domains, we know that lookalike domains are frequently used in phishing attacks and to distribute malware. For example, back in 2017, security researchers found that many certificates that contained the word ‘Paypal’ were used in phishing websites. It’s logical to assume that attackers are using similar tactics with other retail domains.”

60% of the total fake domains and 85% of lookalike domains targeting German retailers got their TLS certificates from Let’s Encrypt. Let's Encrypt Certificate Authority, is an online forum which gives free certificates to website owners that they can use to encrypt traffic, however, it seems miscreants are also taking advantage of its services.

The US Department of Justice has confirmed the extradition of Russian hacker Alexei Burkov from Israel. Accused by Americans of credit card fraud, a Russian citizen has already appeared before a federal judge in Virginia. Burkov faces up to 80 years in prison. The Russian Foreign Ministry sent a note of protest to the State Department, soon the consuls will be sent to the Russian citizen.

"In connection with the extradition of the Russian citizen Burkov from Israel to the United States, we have taken a decisive demarche regarding the “hunt” unleashed by Washington for our citizens around the world. In the note sent to the State Department, we demanded strict compliance by the American side with existing bilateral obligations," reported the press service of the Russian diplomatic mission.

The Embassy noted that Russian diplomats "will soon visit a compatriot in a pretrial detention center in Virginia."

Earlier, the US Department of Justice said that according to court documents, Burkov allegedly ran a website called Cardplanet that sold payment card numbers, many of which belonged to US citizens.
"Stolen data from more than 150,000 payment cards were allegedly sold on Burkov's website and led to fraudulent purchases made from US credit cards worth more than $20 million," stated the US Department of Justice.

It is noted that if Burkov is found guilty on all counts, he faces up to 80 years in prison.
Earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed to exchange the Israeli woman, who has dual citizenship — Israel and the United States. She was sentenced to 7.5 years in prison for smuggling hashish. Putin discussed the case with the Prime Minister of the Jewish state, Benjamin Netanyahu. However, he refused to make such an exchange.

Recall that Burkov was detained at the airport in Tel Aviv in 2015 when he came to Israel on vacation. He was later charged with crimes in the sphere of cybersecurity. He calls himself an information security specialist and denies the charges of committing the crimes imputed to him. All the time since the arrest he spent in Israeli prisons.

It is worth noting that Alexei Burkov will not be the first Russian convicted in the United States, whose return will be required by the Russian Foreign Ministry.

A new security threat has been found which can hit various high-tech android devices by exploiting the Bluetooth and USB accessories to attacks the phone. According to a paper published by researchers from Purdue and Iowa University, the base-band processors of many famous Android phones are modified that enables the hacker to get access. By using specifically modified USB and Bluetooth accessories, the experts could explain how these accessories are misused to give directions such as AT commands that regulate the baseband's working. The research also checked various smartphones such as Samsung, LG, HTC, Google, Motorola, and Huawei that are not very latest but still generally used.

Meanwhile, the experts decoded critical information such as the IMEI number, roaming status, and network settings that can help to locate the targets. The researchers also conducted Denial of Service (DoS) initiatives, interrupt Internet connections and use functions such as Do Not Disturb (DND), call logs, blocking, etc.

Ten smartphone devices from different companies were examined. Fortunately, not all the smartphones fell prey to Bluetooth and USB accessories threat. However, various accessories such as phone chargers, speakers and even headsets can be misused to exploit any device by following the given technique.

"The android devices can't possibly be endangered to the AT command interface in any way," concludes the research team. If interested to read the exploits, it could be found at the Github repository. The research paper would be manifested next month at the 35th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference. The attacked smartphones worked on base-band processors built by Samsung, Qualcomm, and Huawei. The experts informed all the concerned devices and base-band providers and remained 3 months still before announcing to the general public about their conclusions. Meanwhile, Samsung has acted by making security patches for its smartphones.

How to be safe?

The users are suggested not to use accessories that are not known. They are also strictly advised against using public chargers as they can be harmful to smartphones. Using trusted accessories and minimal unknown gadgets are the only solution to the problem.

Leaked documents from a lawsuit filed by a now-defunct startup Six4Three on Facebook shows some 700 pages revealing how Facebook leveraged user data against rivals and offered it up as a sop to friends.

NBC News reported how Facebook's executive team harnessed user data and used it as a bargaining chip to manipulate rivals. There are thousands of leaked documents to support that this was done under the supervision of the company's CEO Mark Zuckerberg.



NBC News has published an entire log of documents containing 7,000 pages including 4,000 internal communications such as emails, web chats, notes, presentations, spreadsheets on Facebook. These documents are dated between 2011 and 2015 that disclose the company's strategy of rewarding partners by giving them preferential data while denying the same to competitors.

The lawsuit that resulted in this major leak, was filed by Six4Three, a now inoperative startup which created the failed app Pikinis. The app allowed users to view pictures posted by people on Facebook and in order to work, the software required access to data on Facebook. The suit accuses Facebook of misusing and abusing data and uneven distribution of it. Other apps including Lulu, Beehive ID, and Rosa Bandet couldn't do business anymore after losing access to data.

The documents also revealed similar operations, for instance, the social network company gave extended access to user data to Amazon, as it partnered with Facebook and spent on Facebook advertising while denied data to MessageMe, a messaging app when it grew large enough to be a competition to Facebook.

Commenting on the documents, Facebook’s vice president and deputy general counsel, Paul Grewal, told NBC News, “As we’ve said many times, Six4Three — creators of the Bikinis app — cherry-picked these documents from years ago as part of a lawsuit to force Facebook to share information on friends of the app’s users.” However, no evidence has been provided by the company to support the "cherry-picked" claim.

In March, this year Zuckerberg said, that Facebook would focus more on its user's privacy as the social network's future. But for Facebook, privacy seems like a PR stunt and data more of a currency.

HK Leaks, a notorious website is targeting Hong Kong pro-democracy supporters, leaking their personal details online and there seems to be no way of catching the site and stopping it.

The website is using a Russian based server and is also supported by China's ruling Communist Party. From Journalists to lawmakers, around 200 individuals, those supporting the protests in Hong Kong have been "doxxed"- had their personal details broadcasted online by the site.

Since June anti-government protests have rocked Hong Kong against proposals to allow extradition to mainland China and clashes between the activists and police have become increasingly violent, with police firing live bullets and protesters attacking officers and throwing petrol bombs. With this new development, of doing activists; the situation shows no sign of dying down.

Privacy Commissioner Stephen Wong said he had ordered HK Leaks to take down all posts but the site remains online. On the home page of the website, a picture of black-clad protester is shown and a banner in Chinese saying, "We want to know who these people are and why they are messing up Hong Kong!". Phone numbers, addresses and personal details of hundreds of people are posted with their "misdeeds". And it is illegal in Hong Kong to disclose certain personal details, including phone numbers, without consent.

HK Leaks has a very sophisticated operation, designed to evade prosecution. It is registered anonymously on a Russian server, DDOS-Guard and has changed domain three times since August.

"The IP address that is shown for the website is not that of the website itself but of the DDOS-Guard company," cybersecurity expert Brian Honan said. The site has a bulletproof anonymous hosting, and whoever is running the website is very good at what they do. It ran as hkleaks.org in early August then migrating to hkleaks.ru, which discontinued in late October and since then three more similar domains have been used by the site.

"This site seems to be really well set up to reveal as little as possible and it doesn't use lots of external services, like buttons, statistics trackers, various scripts that would leak information," said Maarten Schenk, co-founder of the fact-check site Lead Stories.

To extract any details from the domain registrar, a court order would be necessary and the site is heavily supported by the big guns of China with heavy traffic, which is 175,000 unique page views. Chinese Communist Youth League, a group linked to China's Communist Party, has promoted the site's content on its official Weibo accounts. The state-run broadcaster, CCTV and Global Times newspaper, also posted similar messages on their social media accounts.

Some victims also accused the Chinese authorities of involvement behind the leaks, said that the fake address they gave the police during an interrogation showed up on the website HK Leaks.

NATO soldiers stationed in the Baltic States regularly complain that they and their families are victims of unknown Internet trolls and receive frightening anonymous calls. The last such incident occurred with Danish soldiers in late October. The command is confident that Russia is behind the attacks. NATO is preparing to allocate additional millions of euros for the information war.

NATO International Battalion based in Estonia is led by the UK. The soldiers say that since 2017 when they were transferred to the Baltic States they received unpleasant messages from unknown persons via Facebook and Twitter, as well as on personal phone numbers.

The command of NATO believes that it is the Russian bots that troll the soldiers. At the same time, the leadership of the Alliance fears that Russian agents are armed with special devices with portable antennas that allow hacking mobile phones of military personnel to access the information contained in them.

American officers believe that while they were in Estonia, someone was tracking their geo-location on their smartphones. In turn, pilots from the Netherlands complained that during their work in the Baltic States, their wives and girlfriends received anonymous calls with provocative questions, for example, "Do you know what your husband is doing here?" or "Maybe he should leave?". Americans tend to blame the Russian special services for such intrigues. The Dutch also have no doubt that it was the Russians.

In Holland, the harassment case is being considered with "great seriousness," says Colonel Jens Hvid Lenborg.

"The case is serious, as it concerns families, and, in addition, because the callers generally know whose families they are," the military said.
Danish Minister of Defense Trine Brahmsen called it "a cynical violation of all agreements to protect civilians, women and children."

According to Russia expert Flemming Splidsboel Hansen, collecting information about soldiers and their families is part of modern war, for which any defense should be prepared.
Recall that since 2014, NATO stated that it considers Russia its strategic enemy. After that, the North Atlantic Alliance announced an increase in its military presence near the Western borders of Russia.

Russian hackers who are members of the well-known on the Internet 2ch imageboard hacked the website of NATO Rapid Deployable Corps Italy. This is one of NATO’s most combat-ready formations on the European continent.

Unlike Russian military units and formations, NATO formations have direct access to the Internet and even their own websites linked to each other via the Internet. Russian school hackers from the 2ch portal took advantage of this loophole to guide the Italian Corps website.

Hackers renamed the name of the corps, it began to be named NATO Rapid Deployable Corps 2ch.

Then they added the name of their organization 2ch to the number of special forces that are part of the corps. And finally, the name and biography of the corps commander, Lieutenant General Roberto Perretti, were replaced with the data of the administrator of 2ch portal Nariman Namazov, better known under the nickname Abu. Thus, the Russian hacker commanded the Italian NATO corps for some time.
In addition, hackers added a video "Appeal to Obama" in the section with videos, where a drunk Russian man threatens the ex-President of the United States, and a modified anthem of Russia was set as background music.

It is hard to say how far the hackers got into the system and what were the true goals of the hacking arranged as petty hooliganism.

Note that NATO Rapid Deployable Corps Italy, whose website was hacked, is one of the nine rapid deployment corps. They include the most high-tech units of the member countries of the Alliance, including special forces units. One of these units is the Italian corps. It includes a number of Italian special forces, including the one known as Vittorio Veneto, the best special unit of the Italian Bersaglieri. In addition to the Italian parts of the corps subordinated Hungarian, Slovenian, Greek and one of the British special forces units.

The task of the Italian corps is to control southern Europe and North Africa, as well as the organization of special operations in these territories.

Hackers on behalf of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania spread the news about the request of the President of the country Gitanas Nauseda to the United States to establish a military base in Lithuania and transfer nuclear weapons to the country from the Incirlik base in Turkey.

The report also said that in October about 500 US troops will arrive in Lithuania to build the necessary infrastructure. A battalion of this size is really sent to Lithuania for a period of six months to conduct joint exercises with local military units.

According to the media reports, the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry denied the information about the intention of the country's leadership to create an American base.

The Foreign Ministry believes that they were subjected to an Internet attack, which is being investigated by law enforcement agencies, in particular, the National Center for Cyber Security.

The spokesman for the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry Rasa Yakilaitene informed the international community that several media, institutions of NATO member countries, and diplomatic missions received fake news. Moreover, the information was sent from the address of the Department of Communication and Cultural Diplomacy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania - media@urm.lt.

In turn, the representative of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Lithuania Laimis Bratikas linked the hacker attack with the arrival of the US battalion in Lithuania and stressed that this topic will be repeatedly raised in order to discredit the military cooperation of Vilnius and Washington.

This month, the press service of the Russian Embassy in Riga reported that the postal system of the Russian Embassy in Latvia was attacked by hackers. As a result of the attack, there was an automatic mass mailing of spam letters allegedly on behalf of the Russian diplomatic mission.

Earlier, E Hacking News published information that, according to FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov, international terrorist organizations are actively developing their own cyber units. Increasingly, hackers under their control are able to provoke conflicts between countries.

Hundreds, around 338 people have been arrested in the worldwide sting of "largest dark web child porn marketplaces", investigators said.

The now seized English website, "Welcome to Video" hosted 2,00,000 videos showing illegal acts committed to children, which were downloaded more than a million times. The site had eight terabytes of data containing gruesome acts being done to infants, toddlers and children.

The site's owner Jong Woo Son, 23, from Korea is currently in prison, serving a sentence of 18 months. Unites States officials have unsealed nine allegations against him.

"You may try to hide behind technology but, we will find you and arrest you and prosecute you." Jessie Liu, the US attorney for the District of Columbia said in a press conference.

The site was shut down a year ago in March by US authorities, but on Wednesday officials said 338 users have been arrested from 38 countries including UK, Ireland, US, South Korea, Germany, Spain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the Czech Republic and Canada.
The site also used a Bitcoin based marketplace with at least 7,300 transaction worth about 730,000 dollars. UK's National Crime Agency said "The site was one of the first to offer sickening videos for sale using the cryptocurrency bitcoin. "

The arrest was  result of a three years of hunt by National Crime Agency of Britain, and task forces from UK, US, South Korea and Germany. The officials first came across the website while investigating one of UK's worst child sex offender and paedophile, geophysicist Dr Matthew Falder in 2017. Fadler, admitted to 137 offenses and is serving a 25 years sentence for sharing images and abusive videos on the dark web. Then in March, 2018 officials went to South Korea to take down the website's server and to arrest Jong Woo Son, the owner of the site.

The officials were able to arrest many suspects by tracing the cryptocurrency transactions. Seven men from the UK and five from America have already been convicted of the investigation. One of them being, Kyle Fox another child offender already in jail for raping a five-year-old boy and sexually abused a three-year-old girl.
“The scale of this crime is eye-popping and sickening,” said John Fort, the chief of IRS criminal investigations. The task force was able to rescue 23 children from a state of constant abuse.

Bengaluru: Kamin Prajapathi (40), a senior accountant manager in a multinational software company was arrested by the police on Sunday for data theft.

The accused, a resident of Concorde Napa Valley and Kanakapura Road and Bihar stole the data of nearly 300 employees working in the same company, transferring their bank details, credit card details and bank account details to his personal mail.

Prajapathi started working in the company from August 2017 and quit his job in April 2019 though the police said that before resigning he transferred the stolen data to his personal mail with plans to hand the data to another company for a senior-level position. He told the company, he had surplus confidential data that they could use to their advantage and build their business.

KS Santosh, founder of a cybersecurity solutions firm 'Group Cyber ID', says these type of data theft are pretty common, “These frauds occur in startups, where former employees steal data from the startup and begin their own firm using the data. Many companies have filed data theft complaints against individuals,” (Sc Indiatimes.com)

Likewise, Prajapathi allegedly hacked into the website of the company where he worked and is suspected that he had been stealing data since 2017 and selling it to other companies. Aside from the bank details of employees and clients, he also collected pivotal data of the company's clients.

The managers from the private firm, where he previously worked lodged a complaint at the cyber-crime police station, and after a probe the police nabbed Prajapathi confiscating his laptop, CPU and mobile phone. The cyber-crime officials also found an account created by Prajapathi on a web-based email service as solid evidence against him.

There has been a significant rise in data theft cases in the last few years as reliance on digital platforms increase. In the city itself, there have been cases where the miscreants hacked into the system using simple hacking techniques, and thus it is crucial to install effective data security solutions to protect the privacy and curtail cybercrime.

Recall that on Thursday, Sberbank reported a possible leak of credit card accounts, which affects at least 200 customers of the Bank. According to media reports, at the weekend on one of the forums, which was blocked by Roskomnadzor (Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom, Information Technologies and Mass Communications), there were messages about the sale of personal data of Bank customers. The authors of the announcement indicated that they have access to data of 60 million cards.

Sberbank assured that the funds of its customers are safe because credit card accounts that do not have CVV codes, as well as logins and passwords from the Internet Bank were in the public domain. So, fraudsters can not steal money from the cards.

According to German Gref, President of Sberbank, Sberbank employees learned about the incident on the day of the leak, October 2: an ad was found with personal data of employees. After that, the employee of security service of Sberbank contacted an attacker trying to sell the stolen data.

During the conversation, it became clear that we are talking about an internal leak, Gref said.

According to a statement on the Bank’s website, "as a result of the internal investigation, the security service of the Bank in cooperation with law enforcement agencies, on October 4, 2019, identified an employee of the Bank born in 1991, the head of the sector in one of the business units of the Bank, who had access to databases and who tried to steal customer information for selfish purposes," the message on the Bank's website reads. The culprit of the leak faces criminal liability.

The leak indirectly affected the data of 200 cardholders of Sberbank, which have already been reissued, so " the owners have nothing to worry about," Gref said. He noted that the reissue took only two days.

Gref also apologized to customers and thanked them, noting their calmness.

The court began consideration of the case of a hacker from Novosibirsk, who was engaged in the theft of credentials gaming accounts right at the workplace in the Novosibirsk State Agrarian University, where he worked as a security guard. Data was subsequently sold over the Internet. The security guard was engaged in this activity not less than half a year.

31-year-old former employee of a private security company for six months combined his hacker activity with work as a university security guard, this continued until January 2019. According to the materials of the case, the man downloaded hacker programs for stealing logins and passwords for popular gaming platforms, including Steam and the Rockstar Games and Electronic Arts services.

The hacker sold the received data through the FunPay electronic exchange. The investigation was unable to establish the exact number of hacked accounts, but tracked the payment received by the hacker on the site. However, the business did not have high profitability, since in six months the hacker was able to earn only about 1.7 thousand rubles ($26).

The security guard was caught by the FSB officers, calculating the origin of computer attacks by IP-address. The accused has fully admitted his guilt. Prosecutor's office demands for him two years suspended sentence, without payment of a fine.

It is worth noting that this is not the first time in recent years, when a hacker appears in court in the case of hacking accounts with special software. For example, in June 2019, a hacker from Chelyabinsk was sentenced to 10 months in prison for hacking personal accounts of users in payment systems and accounts in social networks with the help of malware. But the hacker did not manage to steal money from the victims.

BENGALURU: In the last four days, five of Bengaluru’s Traffic Police Twitter accounts have been cracked where the hacker alleged access to the accounts, posting spams and changing their usernames.

While the police exhort about strengthening cyber security and the need to use strong unique passwords to safeguard online accounts, their own accounts are being hacked by simple password guessing techniques.

Jayanagar Traffic Police was the first account to be hacked at around 10 pm on Friday, followed by ACP South East Division and soon KR Puram, Shivajinagar and Airport traffic police twitter accounts too were hacked by Sunday.

This is not the first time when Bengaluru’s traffic police have been made a victim of cyber crime - Elliot Alderson, a French based hacker broke into the city’s traffic police website in march this year exposing directories. Even other government sites are not well protected, the Aeronautical Development Agency’s (ADA) TRACES account of the Income Tax Department was hacked with impunity with the culprit still unidentified.

Though, in this case, the culprits simply second-guessed common passwords. A man called up various traffic police stations, claiming to be from the IT Department and asked account details and passwords to reset them. It is suspected that one of the staff members fell for the con and shared the password.

The black hat tried the password on other accounts and voila, it worked!

After breaching their twitter handles, the miscreants posted spam messages from these accounts and changed their usernames resulting in Shivnagar Traffic police handle being renamed as ‘SHIVAJINAGAR CINEMA’ and KR Puram became ‘KR PURAM T BOLIWOOD’.

These consequences could have been avoided by quick thinking and strong passwords. Cyber security experts repeatedly identify the use of strong, unique passwords so that malicious cyber threats can’t find or guess your password. SplashData, a password security company estimates that approximately 10% of individuals used at least one of the 25 worst passwords on this year's list, and approximately 3% used the worst — 123456.

Additional commissioner of police (traffic) BR Ravikanthe Gowda said they have filed a complaint with city cyber crime police and told officials to immediately change passwords to secure their accounts (quoting TOI). They also reported the hacking to twitter awaiting a response.

An officer said they are unable to take back control of their accounts on grounds of lack of trained men for the job.

Bengaluru has only one cyber crime police station with a tally of 8,200 cases this year, though to open more of these has been repeatedly proposed to no effect.

Smart home products designed by Nest such as smart cameras, smart displays, smart thermostats, and smart doorbells to make our lives more comfortable and safe, may not be all that safe according to a horrifying incident reported by a Milwaukee, Wisconsin based couple, Samantha and Lamont Westmoreland.

 After a hacker hacked into the couple’s home and took control of their gadgets, Samantha said, "It's (installation of gadgets) supposed to make me feel safe, and I didn't feel safe", "My heart was racing, I felt so violated at that point."

As per a report by Fox 6 News, on September 17th, Samantha returned home in which she has Nest camera, a doorbell and a thermostat installed, and found the atmosphere unreasonably warmer, she immediately noticed that her smart thermostat has risen up to 32 degrees Celsius (90 degrees Fahrenheit).

Initially, she assumed it to be a glitch and set it back to the room temperature, but it kept on going up after every time she turned it down. A while later, the couple heard a voice talking to them from their Nest camera and afterward it played vulgar music. Samantha went ahead, unplugged the camera and turned it to face the ceiling. They changed the passwords of all the three devices but as the issues persisted, they resorted to contacting their internet service provider to have their network and Ids reset.

The couple was of the opinion that their Wi-Fi network and Nest camera was hacked, putting the actual problem into perspective, Lamont Westmoreland said, "If someone hacks into your Wi-Fi, they shouldn't be able to have access to those Nest devices without some sort of wall they have to get over,"

In a conversation with Fox 6 News, the couple revealed that the smart home accessories they had installed at their home since last year, cost them $700, and that they have never faced any problem before this; however, in the wake of this terrifying incident they had a change of mind regarding smart home devices.

Meanwhile, responding to the disturbing experience, a spokesperson of Google, told a media outlet, “Nest was not breached. These reports are based on customers using compromised passwords. In nearly all cases, two-factor verification eliminates this type of security risk,"

Hacker, who has been in the pretrial detention center for the fifth year, made a statement to the head of the Investigative Committee of Russia. He insists that his case was fabricated with the participation of a Kaspersky Lab convicted of high treason along with FSB officers.

Russian hacker Dmitry Popelysh, accused of stealing money from the accounts of Sberbank and VTB together with his twin brother Eugene, said that he sent a complaint to the head of the Russian Investigative Committee. According to the hacker, the criminal case against him and his twin brother was fabricated.

The hacker said that ex-employee of Kaspersky Lab Stoyanov blackmailed and threatened him. Later, he demanded that brothers Popelysh provide technical support to some servers.

It is reported that mentions of an unknown employee who forced the hackers to commit hacks is in the surrender of Popelysh for 2015. However, this information was not verified by the investigation.

Previously, Stoyanov was the head of the computer incident investigation Department at Kaspersky Lab. He also participated in the examination of case of Popelysh.

The representative of Kaspersky Lab told that the company is not aware of Dmitry Popelysh’s appeal to the Investigative Committee.

Recall that in 2012 the brothers Popelysh were convicted of embezzlement of 13 million rubles from customers of banks. In 2015, they were again detained and accused of creating and actively using malware. According to the case, the men stole about 12.5 million rubles ($195,000) in two years. In the summer of 2018, they were sentenced to eight years. In 2019, the sentence was canceled in connection with "violations committed during the preliminary investigation." In total, they have been detained for four years and four months.

It is interesting to note that Dmitry Popelysh is already the second Russian hacker who publicly stated that experts investigating his criminal case forced him to commit hacks. Konstantin Kozlovsky, who has been in a pretrial detention center since May 2016 on charges of organizing a hacker group Lurk, claimed that he was recruited by FSB in 2008 and done various cyber attacks for a long time. He also mentioned that his supervisor was FSB major Dmitry Dokuchaev.