CS Money Making Threats
Driven by Money
A few major risks that businesses commonly encounter are as follows:
- Ransomware files and systems are encrypted with attackers keys and they demand you to pay money to get your data back.
- Cryptocurrency miners; your systems are infected with a low-profile cryptocurrency mining tool. This tool uses the CPU to try make money on a cryptocurrency for the attackers.
- BEC (“Business Email Compromise”). Users get hacked through all sorts of methods and their emails are compromised. Via email compromise the attackers can intercept communications, for example an invoice, and try to redirect payments to other banks and accounts.
Cybercriminals have many options for generating income, which draws attention from the public.
Value and Power
Numerous IT-related items have value and power, such as:
- Bandwidth can be used to pressure businesses by targeting them with DDOS (“Distributed Denial of Service”) attacks.
- Hacked systems may have sensitive information worth money, for example business proprietary information, online gaming assets, sensitive photographs and pictures.
- Attackers can install themselves in browsers and try to hijack the online banking use.
Because of the possibility of making large sums of money in the cyberspace, an increasing number of criminal gangs and other opportunists are joining the fray and complicating our lives.
Threatening for Money
Extortion is a popular tactic used by cybercriminals to extract money. In this type of attack, a person is held captive using information about them, and they are forced to pay a ransom to be freed. Think about the following typical situation:
- A person meets up with someone online, the other party is actually a scam artists trying to trick the victim.
- They engage in interesting conversations and seem to make an immediate deep bond between one another.
- They might even engage in video conversations, but the scam artists is for example using recorded video or simply has an excuse for not being able to activate their microphone or web-camera.
- One thing might lead to another and the relationship could turn sexual. The scam artist tries to convince the victim in giving up personal pictures and recordings of themselves, likely in compromising situations.
- Once the scam artist receives this material, perhaps even returning fake pictures of innocent people in similar situations, the extortion begins.
- The scam artist can now threaten to release the compromising material to family members, co-workers and others, offering to delete the material if a sum of money is paid into the scam artists account.
Narratives such as this are by no means unique, and there are innumerable circumstances and chances in which perpetrators might profit from victims use the Internet without realizing the risks involved.
