Money Mules

The tide in cybercrime is shifting away from attacks on Windows machines and migrating to the mobile marketplace, according to a just released yearly report from Cisco.

Some low level criminal networks have profiles in everyday social networks. Would researching these profiles during cyber intrusion research risk tipping off the bad guys?

Our G-men and G-women are going after the bad guys.

A group of cybercriminals stole some $890,000 from the customers of an unnamed, large U.K. bank, according to researchers at security firm M86. Attackers last month distributed exploits via infected websites and malicious advertisements to compromise victims' browsers and install a new version of the data stealing-trojan Zeus onto their PCs. The botnet operators programmed the malware to wait for the bank balance of infected users to reach at least $1,000, after which they conducted fraudulent transactions that wired funds to the accounts of money mules. Researchers discovered 3,000 compromised accounts, including some belonging to businesses. — AM

Ben Feinstein, director of research at SecureWorks, reveals the inner workings of Russian cybercrime gang that leveraged botnets, VPN tunnels, social engineering and money mules to create a $9 million check counterfeiting scheme. Details of the racket were announced last week at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.