Fortinet Threat Report highlights Cybercriminals
Fortinet has announced its December 2010 Threat Landscape report, which identifies a concerning evolutionary step cybercriminal operations are taking to more effectively diversify the distribution of their ill-gotten gains.
"This month, we saw a wide variety of money mule recruitment campaigns that, for the first time, targeted specific countries in an orchestrated manner," said Derek Manky, Project Manager, Cyber Security and Threat Research at Fortinet. “The campaigns, which were seeded in a number of Asian and European countries, solicited local individuals who already have or had established relationships in the banking industry or were looking for work as 'online sales administrators'."
To make these "localized" campaigns even more effective, they incorporated regional-sounding domain names, such as cv-eur.com, asia-sitezen.com and australia-resume.com. Upon closer scrutiny, Fortinet's FortiGuard team discovered all three domains were registered to the same Russian contact, and all contact addresses for worldwide recruitment used Google mail hosting. By using localized campaigns, criminals can obtain mule accounts internationally - each one falling under different banks and governing laws. Thus, if one is taken offline (due to increased enforcement activity), the others will remain online and business will be as usual.
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