#cybercrime

#cybercrime

Ransomware hacks, data theft, crypto scams and sextortion cover a broad range of cybercrimes carried out by an equally varied list of assailants. But there is also an English-speaking criminal ecosystem carrying out these activities that defies conventional categorisation. Nonetheless, it does have a name: the Com. Short for community, the Com is a loose affiliation of cyber-criminals, largely native English language speakers typically aged from 16 to 25.

That's the conclusion we'd like to believe any sane person would likely draw, reading this week's absurd report from South Korea, where four people were arrested after allegedly hacking an astounding 120,000 separate commercial home video cameras stationed in houses and businesses. As if that level of breach isn't inherently icky enough, several of the suspects then reportedly used the hacked material to make and then sell sexually explicit exploitation videos of strangers to foreign-based web networks that illegally distribute hacked, pornographic camera footage.

Young threat actors may be rebels without a cause. These cybercriminals typically grow out of their offending ways by the time they turn 20, according to data published by the Dutch government. In a report examining the social cost of adolescent crime, the Dutch House of Representatives cited various research papers to show that teenagers tend to explore their criminal tendencies at similar ages, regardless of the type of crime.

Are you a wizard with words? Do you like money without caring how you get it? You could be in luck now that a new role in cybercrime appears to have opened up - poetic LLM jailbreaking. A research team in Italy published a paper this week, with one of its members saying that the "findings are honestly wilder than we expected."

On Christmas Day 2024, a Russian-linked laundering network bought itself a very special present: a controlling stake in a Kyrgyzstan bank, later used to wash cybercrime profits and funnel money into Moscow's war machine, according to the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA). The network, exposed through the NCA's long-running Operation Destabilise, has been sucking up dirty cash across at least 28 UK towns and cities, converting it into cryptocurrency, and using that crypto to move funds through a bank it quietly acquired in Kyrgyzstan.

Cybercrime is a serious threat to the global economy, destroying livelihoods, sowing distrust, and undermining growth. One forecast has it costing more than $15 trillion annually by the end of the decade. If so, only the GDPs of the U.S. and China are bigger. There's cause for hope, though. As cyberthreats evolve, innovation is meeting the challenge. New solutions are leveraging AI, real-time threat intelligence, collaborative networks, and advanced authentication technologies.

Video games have come a long way since they gained widespread popularity in the 1970s and the numbers of people playing them have rocketed. Today, it is estimated that there are about 3 billion gamers worldwide, including more than 90% of gen Z, who spend on average more than 12 hours a week gaming. Modern gaming epics are packed with imagination and invention, drawing young people into noisy, colourful, and often seemingly infinite worlds that they can shape and develop themselves.

When I was a teenager, gaming completely took over my life. I'd play for 12 or more hours a day; it was all I thought about. Video games gave me a different way to socialise because I didn't enjoy school and didn't have much of a social life offline. The gaming world became my entire environment, my escape, my community.

The Convention took five years to develop and has three purposes: Promote and strengthen measures to prevent and combat cybercrime more efficiently and effectively; Promote, facilitate and strengthen international cooperation in preventing and combating cybercrime; and Promote, facilitate and support technical assistance and capacity-building to prevent and combat cybercrime, in particular for the benefit of developing countries. Those goals are hard to oppose.

An "armchair thief" hacked into a department store's customer accounts, took their loyalty points and used them to buy high-value goods for himself in a "sophisticated, devious" cyber attack.

The FBI has not been as quick to adopt AI in its day-to-day operations because it handles sensitive data that requires stringent protections and oversight to maintain security and legal standards, he said. "We're trying to catch up in many ways, and part of that is because we have very sensitive datasets that we have to make sure we protect because of the authorities that we have," Leatherman said.

The number of fraudulent payments reached €160m last year with so-called e-money fraud suffering the sharpest rise, a study by the Central Bank of Ireland shows. The biggest losses last year were credit transfers, or bank payments, followed by card payments, which made up a combined €113m. Neither saw significant increase, however, but fraudulent e-money payments rose from €3.3m in 2023 to €25.6m last year. E-money is the digital form of cash stored electronically, which can also be referred to as digital or electronic wallets.

In a blog post, Redmond said a cybercrime crew it tracks as Storm-2657 has been targeting university employees since March 2025, hijacking salaries by breaking into HR software such as Workday. The attack is as audacious as it is simple: compromise HR and email accounts, quietly change payroll settings, and redirect pay packets into attacker-controlled bank accounts. Microsoft has dubbed the operation "payroll pirate," a nod to the way crooks plunder staff wages without touching the employer's systems directly.

Cybercrime continues to make headlines, with major brands and institutions recently forced to suspend online operations in the wake of attacks. Bad actors can exploit the Domain Name System (DNS) in schemes like phishing and ransomware, using fraudulent or lookalike domains to deceive consumers and carry out malicious activity.

Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters has launched an unusual crowdsourced extortion scheme, offering $10 in Bitcoin to anyone willing to help pressure their alleged victims into paying ransoms.. The cybercrime collective is encouraging followers to email senior executives at organizations it claims to have breached, urging them to pay up and avoid publicity about the group's new data leak site. Those who contact executives through personal email accounts will receive higher rewards,

A man in his 40s was arrested in southern England over an alleged cyberattack that disrupted several European airports in recent days, including at London Heathrow, law enforcement officials said Wednesday.

Due to the sheer scale of the infrastructure of this single SIM farm-and the fact that it reportedly came onto the Secret Service's radar after it was exploited in "swatting" attacks that targeted US members of Congress around Christmas of 2023-the agency has warned that the operation, which has been at least partially dismantled, posed a serious threat of a disruptive attack on cellular service.