Cyber-demic’s Dark Side
Brian Stack
Vice President of Engineering & Dark Web Intelligence at Experian Consumer Services
February 2021
A monthly digest on dark web activity which is heavily influenced by the impact of COVID-19, remote working, nation state activity, seasonal scams, major data breaches, as well as general ID theft protection, data trends, tips and recommendations.
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Lonely Hearts Targeted
What else has the pandemic affected?...A rise in romance scams…In 2019, Americans lost $201 million to romance scams, and in 2020 it was a whopping $605 million according to the FBI…Research conducted by the Online Dating Association (ODA) links the rise in romance scams to the fact that more people are using online dating due to social distancing restrictions…Scammers don’t just stop after Valentine’s Day so always be on guard when engaging with people online, don’t provide your personal information and never send anyone any money...Check out your Romeos and Juliets by googling them on sites like tineye.com and socialcatfish.com.
There’s always going to be another Don
The world’s largest illegal marketplace, DarkMarket, was taken down in an international operation…But don’t worry there are plenty of cybercriminals looking to take its place as top dog and the three most popular now are White House, Versus and Big Blue, according to deeponionweb.com…Many fans were probably thinking, ‘you go girl’ and that equality truly reigns in all places as DarkMarket advertised itself as being the only such site administered exclusively by women…However, possibly disappointing for some - it wasn’t true…We’ll see how much of the data exposed by the SolarWinds breach will end up on the dark web, go to my colleague Mike Bruemmer’s post to learn more.