5 Interesting Cyber Crime Stories

Living in this Internet Era, cybercrime has become a reality. Most of us might not have been a victim of this novel and digital world crime, but many have experienced it, ranging from individual to enterprises. These incidents stories reach us after the forensic investigators try to reverse the crime scene and get the artifacts so that the world is aware of rising crimes.

This blog aims to provide five interesting cybercrime stories to help you get aware and be safe while you live in the cyber world.

Story 1

A retired GP in the UK is under trial accused of murdering his pension advisor. The National Crime Agency (NCA) prosecutors have also found him accused of malicious calls and SMS communications. Moreover, the prosecutors moved to the dark web and found some digital evidence associated with the murder. On the dark web, a website named Crime Bay by Chechen Mob listed order for killing Mr. Bolden, the pension advisor. The agency said that GP used a particular browser to access the site and created an account there and choose the hitting options of ‘Kill the bastard’. The payment for hitman was in Bitcoin, which was worth $ 5000. These showed the evidence for his apparent involvement in digital crime

Story 2

Ashley Madison is a famous data breach. Its investigations were carried out by the Australian and Canadian privacy commissioner. The hack resulted in the online publishing of data of millions of users of the site. This includes many government officials as well. The breach consists of personal information that includes email accounts and credit card numbers. The investigations after the breach raised the questions on the data handling of users’ data and not following standard information security practices. The hacker’s group named Impact Team threatened to release the data and demanded to disband the site

Story 3

Wanna cry is one of the deadliest and famous ransomware attacks that infected millions of systems spanning users, private and government systems. A robust malware is exploiting the windows SMB vulnerability that was initially discovered by the NSA. This programmed widely spread across various healthcare and other networks. Once reached a system, it encrypts all the hard disk and renders the system useless unless the ransom of $300 is paid though Microsoft launched a patch earlier that was never applied at such a large scale anywhere [3].

Story 4

In March 2018, a widespread hack in the US was carried out by a group of Iranian hackers that lead to penetration of 144 US universities, 176 universities in 21 other countries, 47 private companies and others. Using the spear-phishing, the attackers were able to trick university professors letting the attackers compromise their accounts and gaining data. Hackers stole 31 TB of data and $3 billion Intellectual property loss

Story 5

A hacking campaign from Russia launched a new malware affecting 500,000 routers. The malware named VPNFilter created a botnet from the affected devices and could cause tamper with the web activity and data going through the routers. This malware can be used in spam campaigns and targeted attacks. The LEA has been working on to quarantine routers and analyze the malware impacts.

Abdul Saboor Malik

Internet Governance Activist | Information Security Expert | CyberSecurity Blogger | Digital Grassroot Ambassador