The Cyber Security industry has seen a massive boost during the current pandemic, with users working remotely for the first time and permissions granted on the fly the Security teams in the enterprise have been working round the clock to ensure critical data and systems are secure. But due to the general chaos of Covid combined with the need to keep businesses running there are systems that have been less than optimally configured.
All this gives us the impression that the Cybercrime world must be thriving in the current environment. But apparently that is not always the case, the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre has released a series of reports on how the Pandemic has impacted cybercrime. The reports are a fascinating read as they show how even the criminals are facing hardships due to the pandemic. For example, below is an extract from the report on the impact on International drug trade due to the shipping disruptions caused by lockdowns.
“The initial wave of COVID lockdowns in China caused substantial disruption to international shipping,compounded by the subsequent lockdowns in the rest of the world. Despite their ‘online’ character, drugscryptomarkets (online markets for legal and illegal drugs which are accessed securely through anonymitynetworks such as Tor) are reliant on the postal and shipping services for the delivery of drugs and precursorsto suppliers and end users. We have observed, in our scraped datasets of illicit online forums and discussionboards, evidence of significant disruption of these pathways, and a range of effects on these illicit markets.At the initial peak of lockdown measures, shipping times (especially in international routes which passedthrough China) were being routinely delayed by up to three months (as reported in cryptomarket discussions).This caused significant friction to international orders for postal drug delivery, with many dealers reportingthat they were switching to orders within the same nation only, and others struggling to source supply.”
Brian Kerbs from Kerbs on Security wrote a comprehensive article on How Cybercriminals are Weathering COVID-19 and its worth a read as well.
But apparently a number of criminal reshipping services are reporting difficulties due to the increased wait time when calling FedEx or UPS (to divert carded goods that merchants end up shipping to the cardholder’s address instead of to the mule’s). In response, these operations are raising their prices and warning of longer shipping times, which in turn could hamper the activities of other actors who depend on those services.
That’s according to Intel 471, a cyber intelligence company that closely monitors hundreds of online crime forums. In a report published today, the company said since late March 2020 it has observed several crooks complaining about COVID-19 interfering with the daily activities of their various money mules (people hired to help launder the proceeds of cybercrime).
The same is happening for real world crime also, Jani was telling me about this article on Goa where the local drug dealers are out of job because no tourists are visiting so they all are now selling fish to survive.
Well this is all for now. Will write more later.
– Suramya