RUSSIAN cyber crooks have managed to steal more than 50million passwords this year alone, experts claim.
34 Russian-speaking groups have been uncovered distributing “info-stealing malware”.
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They pulled it off via chat app Telegram, according to cyber firm Group-IB.
The criminals mainly got hold of gaming accounts for platforms like Steam and Roblox.
But they also managed to get sensitive login details for Amazon and Paypal too.
Their main target appears to have been people in the US, Brazil, India, Germany, and Indonesia.
Some 890,000 devices were infected using off-the-shelf info-stealing malware.
This allows hackers to collect details stored in browser.
Group-IB believes stealers are “one of the top threats to watch in the coming year”
“After a successful attack, the scammers either obtain money themselves using the stolen data, or they sell the stolen information in the cybercriminal underground,” the firm said.
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The Digital Risk Protection team added: “The influx of a huge number of workers into the popular scam Classiscam — which Group-IB’s Unified Risk Platform identified, at its peak, comprised over a thousand criminal groups and hundreds of thousands of fake websites — has led to criminals competing for resources and looking for new ways to make profits.
“The popularity of schemes involving stealers can be explained by the low entry barrier.
“Beginners do not need to have advanced technical knowledge as the process is fully automated and the worker’s only task is to create a file with a stealer in the Telegram bot and drive traffic to it.
“For victims whose computers become infected with a stealer, however, the consequences can be disastrous.”
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This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk
