Wire Fraud | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) has sentenced a 31-year-old man to 10 years in prison for laundering more than $4.5 million through business email compromise ( BEC ) schemes and romance scams. Malachi Mullings, 31, of Sandy Springs, Georgia pleaded guilty to the money laundering offenses in January 2023. According to court documents, Mullings is said to have opened 20 bank accounts in the name of a non-existent company named The Mullings Group LLC., which served as a conduit to launder the fraudulent proceeds from at least 2019 to July 2021. The scheme netted millions of dollars via BEC attacks targeting a healthcare benefit program, private companies, and other entities, as well as romance fraud schemes targeting the elderly. A BEC scam is a form of targeted cyber attack in which financially motivated bad actors trick unsuspecting executives and employees into sending money or sensitive data to accounts under their control using various social engineering ploys. Such atta...

Google has filed a lawsuit in the U.S. against two app developers for allegedly engaging in an "international online consumer investment fraud scheme" that tricked users into downloading bogus Android apps from the Google Play Store and other sources and stealing their funds under the guise of promising higher returns. The individuals in question are Yunfeng Sun (aka Alphonse Sun) and Hongnam Cheung (aka Zhang Hongnim or Stanford Fischer), who are believed to be based in Shenzhen and Hong Kong, respectively. The defendants are said to have uploaded about 87 crypto apps to the Play Store to pull off the social engineering scam since at least 2019, with over 100,000 users downloading them and leading to substantial financial losses. "The gains conveyed by the apps were illusory," the tech giant said in its complaint. "And the scheme did not end there." "Instead, when individual victims attempted to withdraw their balances, defendants and their co...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Friday unsealed an indictment against an Iranian national for his alleged involvement in a multi-year cyber-enabled campaign designed to compromise U.S. governmental and private entities. More than a dozen entities are said to have been targeted, including the U.S. Departments of the Treasury and State, defense contractors that support U.S. Department of Defense programs, and an accounting firm and a hospitality company, both based in New York. Alireza Shafie Nasab, 39, claimed to be a cybersecurity specialist for a company named Mahak Rayan Afraz while participating in a persistent campaign targeting the U.S. from at least in or about 2016 through or about April 2021. "As alleged, Alireza Shafie Nasab participated in a cyber campaign using spear-phishing and other hacking techniques to infect more than 200,000 victim devices, many of which contained sensitive or classified defense information,"  said  U.S. Attorney Damian Williams f...

A Ukrainian national has pleaded guilty in the U.S. to his role in two different malware schemes, Zeus and IcedID, between May 2009 and February 2021. Vyacheslav Igorevich Penchukov (aka Vyacheslav Igoravich Andreev, father, and tank), 37, was  arrested  by Swiss authorities in October 2022 and extradited to the U.S. last year. He was added to the FBI's most-wanted list in 2012. The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ)  described  Penchukov as a "leader of two prolific malware groups" that infected thousands of computers with malware, leading to ransomware and the theft of millions of dollars. This included the Zeus banking trojan that facilitated the theft of bank account information, passwords, personal identification numbers, and other details necessary to login to online banking accounts. Penchukov and his co-conspirators, as part of the "wide-ranging racketeering enterprise" dubbed Jabber Zeus gang, then masqueraded as employees of the victims to initiate ...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said it charged 19 individuals worldwide in connection with the now-defunct xDedic Marketplace , which is estimated to have facilitated more than $68 million in fraud. In  wrapping up its investigation  into the dark web portal, the agency said the transnational operation was the result of close cooperation with law enforcement authorities from Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Ukraine, and Europol. Of the 19 defendants, three have been sentenced to 6.5 years in prison, eight have been awarded jail terms ranging from one year to five years, and one individual has been ordered to serve five years' probation. One among them includes Glib Oleksandr Ivanov-Tolpintsev, a Ukrainian national who was  sentenced to four years in prison  in May 2022 for selling compromised credentials on xDedic and making $82,648 in illegal profits. Dariy Pankov, described by the DoJ as one of the highest sellers by volume, offered credentials of no ...