X-Industry

In recent years the rise of illicit activities conducted within online messaging platforms has become a growing concern for countless industries.  Telegram is one of the most notable platforms that has been host to many malicious actors and nefarious activities.  Thanks to its accessibility, popularity, and user anonymity, Telegram has attracted many threat actors driven by criminal purposes.[1]

Many cybercriminals have moved operations into illicit telegram channels to expand their reach and ex

Kaspersky has identified a new trend in phishing techniques, with threat actors increasingly utilizing Telegram to automate their activities and provide various services.  In a recent advisory, Kaspersky, one of their web content analysts, revealed that phishers create Telegram channels to educate their audience about phishing and share links to these channels via YouTube, GitHub, and phishing kits.  Many channels offer tools to automate malicious workflows, such as generating phishing pages or

A Russian-speaking "Scam-as-a-Service" (SaaS) operation called, "Classiscam" is expanding globally, with 40 interconnected gangs in about a dozen countries using fake product advertisements to launch phishing schemes, the security firm Group-IB reports.  This “SaaS” is adding to the long list of hacker services for anyone to buy with some spare Bitcoin.

The fraud actors are posting fake online classified advertisements for products to trick interested buyers into visiting phishing pages, where t

Masked demonstrators in Hong Kong; the sign says “Carrie Lam is not my mother”

Hong Kong protests in June 2019 brought as many as two million demonstrators onto the streets to fight a planned extradition law that would allow mainland China’s government to pull dissenters from Hong Kong for charging in Beijing.  These mass demonstrations were largely coordinated through Telegram, an app that provides end-to-end encryption and the ability to manage communications for very large groups. 

On 12 June

On 1 May 2019, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed “Internet sovereignty” bill.  New requirements to use ISPs to track traffic origin will likely force traffic decryption and support of internal censorship efforts.  In the future, Russia will develop its own DNS system to conduct special Internet controls.  Currently, LinkedIn is banned in Russia.  Russian national payment system, Mir, was developed after several Russian banks were denied services by US-based Visa and MasterCard.  Future st