On July 22, 2016 the UK’s Office for National Statistics released crime details for the year ending March 2016. For the first time, this data included information about fraud and computer misuse offenses, which was compiled in the National Crime Survey for the first time in October 2015. While the police recorded 4.5 million offenses from March 2015 to March 2016, the survey indicates there were likely 3.8 million fraud instances and 2 million computer misuse instances during that same year, with the vast majority of these crimes being unreported to law enforcement. The report has caused for a new call for additional cyber crime reporting at all levels. In the UK, consumers and businesses alike are encouraged to submit suspicious activities and cases of loss to ActionFraud: the National Fraud & Cyber Crime Reporting Center. ActionFraud also offers a Business Reporting Tool for bulk submissions by businesses of both fraud and scam emails.*
Earlier in July, the UK’s National Crime Agency also released their report “Cyber Crime Assessment 2016.” The primary point made by the NCA report is the “need for a stronger law enforcement and business partnership to fight cyber crime.”
The NCA report called special attention to the sophisticated abilities of international crime groups, making them “the most competent and dangerous cyber criminals targeting UK businesses.” These groups are behind the most sophisticated financial crimes malware.
“This malware is a substantial source of financial crime in the UK, with three variants: DRIDEX, NEVERQUEST and DYRE /DYREZA, appearing frequently and responsible for many hundreds of thousands of individual crimes in 2015.”
The report also highlights the danger of ransomware and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
While arrests were made in the DRIDEX case, the same botnet is now the leading source of the Locky ransomware family, the focus of more than 50 PhishMe Intelligence reports in the past month alone!
Statements made in March by Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, the police commissioner of the Metropolitan Police of London, received mixed reviews when he said that banks that refunded their customers after cyber incidents were “rewarding them for bad behavior” instead of teaching them to be safer online. The GCHQ suggested that 80% of consumer-facing cyber crime could be stopped just by choosing safer passwords and keeping one’s systems updated with current security patches.
The NCA report points out, however, that it isn’t just consumers who are not pulling their weight in the fight against cyber crime. Businesses also have a responsibility to do more. The report urges corporate board of directors to make sure that their information technology teams are not merely checking the boxes required of compliance regulations, but taking an active role in assisting the cause by ensuring that their businesses are reporting cyber crime incidents. As widely seen in the United States, one may be compliant with PCI, Sarbanes Oxley, HIPAA, and other regulatory standards yet still be extremely vulnerable to the type of sophisticated cyber attacks presented by these sophisticated international crime groups.
“Directors also have an important role in addressing the under-reporting of cyber crime which continues to obscure the full understanding of, and hence responses to, cyber crime in the UK. In particular, we urge businesses to report when they are victims of cyber crime and to share more intelligence, both with law enforcement and with each other.”
– NCA Strategic Cyber Industry Group
Dridex, NeverQuest, Dyre, Ransomware – Meet PhishMe Reporter & Triage
At PhishMe, we are intimately familiar with the prevalence of the malware families discussed in the UK government’s reports. We provide detailed intelligence reports to our customers about all of those malware families, which are among the most common email-based threats that we encounter as we scrub through millions of each emails each day to identify the greatest threats and get human-driven analysis about those threats back out to our customers.
We support the security strategy and defense posture recommended by the NCA Strategic Cyber Industry Group. Our industry must move from reactive, check-box security mentality to a proactive method of gathering and analyzing security incident reporting. PhishMe customers not only have the ability for every employee to become part of the solution to “under-reporting” with a click of the mouse on the “Report Phishing” button, but also to share that information back to PhishMe to allow us to provide indicators that help protect ALL customers and to help inform our law enforcement partners.
PhishMe Triage provides a single place for all of those employee reports to be integrated, if your business would like to answer the call to do more information sharing about these top malicious threats. By providing a dashboard-driven interface to all employee-reported malicious emails, the security team can quickly spot the most dangerous trends, confirm the facts, and report to law enforcement, as recommended in the UK’s National Crime Agency report.
In addition, PhishMe Intelligence customers received over 2,500 malware email campaign reports in addition to more than 600,000 individual phishing reports that can be used as an intelligence feed to strengthen your corporate defenses against these malicious actors.
We look forward to partnering with our UK-customers, and all of our customers, who choose to take an active stance in the fight against cyber crime by answering the call for increased vigilance and reporting.
* – U.S. businesses are encouraged to report cyber crime and fraud to the FBI’s Internet Crime & Complaint Center, IC3.gov.
