How are cyber criminals rolling in 2025?
26 comments
·May 5, 2025fckgw
lifeisstillgood
So, I craft a search where the search query is “call 1 800 scam”, then I buy a google ad with key word of “ticketmaster help”, the ad links to real ticketmaster with my query, and google shows that ad to someone having trouble and hey presto they call my scam line at 4 quid a minute from their mobile?
Yuck all round. I mean ticketmaster is just a sin eater for greedy popstars but yuck ..
RGamma
How desperate one has to be...
null
SoftTalker
Among the common vulnerabilities listed:
> Outdated Wordpress plugins and CMS systems
No surprise, having worked in edu the following scenario was very common:
1) Researcher gets a grant for a project
2) Grad student sets up a Drupal site for the project
3) Things are maintained and updated for a couple of years
4) Grant runs out, project wraps up, student graduates, everyone forgets about the server which sits unattended and unmaintained.
Still happens, but most universites have really clamped down on the ability to just stand up a web server on the network. Many are requiring everything to be on a centrally managed enterprise CMS which is a PITA but that's the fallout for too much sloppy administration.
semi-extrinsic
At my old university ~15 years ago, all IPs of all computers were public IPV4 addresses. Any computer plugged in to any ethernet port on campus was given such a "quasi-static" IP address. All normal ports were open - ssh, http(s), you name it. It was the OG zero trust architecture.
foobarian
Ah the good old days of putting my head down at my desk lulled into a nap by the once-a-second sounds of ssh login attempt logs being written to the spinning rust drive...
yjftsjthsd-h
> At my old university ~15 years ago, all IPs of all computers were public IPV4 addresses. Any computer plugged in to any ethernet port on campus was given such a "quasi-static" IP address.
Well that's fine; my school did the same thing and other than feeling wasteful there was no-
> All normal ports were open - ssh, http(s), you name it. It was the OG zero trust architecture.
Oh. Yeah, open ports by default is... and interesting life choice.
fecal_henge
This just got cancelled at my institution. I could have retained it if I argued strongly enough.
kevin_thibedeau
The low friction solution is to serve public_html from a home dir and direct users to generate static sites.
notyourwork
Yep, I remember having ssh access to production servers from a non-work machine at a well known university.
We could also get external ips and connectivity without much supervision. Core security needs to be prioritized to avoid this from happening.
leftcenterright
> Norton, Kaspersky, Zscaler, F-secure, NordVPN, Virustotal, Palo Alto: all of them marked these links as safe.
This is sad to see, these tools are forced down so many companies in name of "compliance" while totally not worth the maintenance and cost overhead. Apparently they haven't got any better in the last decade.
Muromec
Well, that's exactly the difference between complience and security
charcircuit
I'm curious if the link inside the pdf would have been detected.
vin10
It is the same for nested links as well. They mostly have a chain of links, each one taking you to a new one with hop count ranging anywhere from 5 up to 10 or more.
null
gitroom
damn, i remember seeing old servers just getting dusty and full of holes after the student left. kinda crazy how much messy stuff is hiding in corners like that lol
wood_spirit
They create meme coins etc?
Alex-Programs
Is it just me or is cybersecurity... Calming down? I feel like a few years ago there was constant news of ransomware, intrusions, vulnerabilities, etc, but more recently the defensive side seems to have the upper hand.
chelmzy
Not particularly. The only thing I have noticed in the past decade is the decline of the "American Hacker". Most groups are foreign but will partner with younger Americans for social engineering (ex. Scattered Spider). You just don't have people like Albert Gonzalez in America now. However, I suspect that many American hackers have shifted to targeting overseas countries that are not friendly with the US.
3abiton
>
I have been advised not to disclose specific vulnerabilities since the parties involved are not most friendly and transparent in handling security reports. While most of these got reported and some even got fixed, I can only disclose high-level details of the compromise path. Some just ghosted me after conveniently fixing the flaws, and one even gave me a phone call, which was somewhat scary and perhaps not worth the adrenaline.
What an unprofessional sysadmin move, borderline infuriating.
DyslexicAtheist
john wick site:europa.eu https://www.google.com/search?q=john+wick+site%3Aeuropa.eu&h...
gta 5 site:europa.eu https://www.google.com/search?q=gta+5+site%3Aeuropa.eu&hl=en
Watch full site:europa.eu https://www.google.com/search?q=Watch+full+site%3Aeuropa.eu&...
leftcenterright
could someone with legal/data-privacy expertise comment if this would be something they have to disclose under data breach disclosure laws?
Technically it might not be a "data leak", but it very well could result in one if arbitrary content (including js?) can be uploaded to these webpages?
DyslexicAtheist
they've been contacted through the "proper channels" over 18 months ago by several (more than 1) security researchers.
After some people started publicly naming and shaming on LinkedIn and tagging ENISA, the issue got some exposure, but still was not fixed. It only made it more evident that several people independently reported these issues, and they became aware of peers stumbling over the issue. Still nothing happened.
ENISA is supposed to act as a CNA and expects to be notified of data breaches from EU based orgs for PSIRT / CSIRT as part of the Cybersec Resiliance Act and other laws.
Would I trust that vulnerability data that gets reported as a CVE, or a breach notification is safe with ENSIA ?
... feck no!
Would I trust that documents that europa.eu hosts on its infra are authentic? (such as security-compliance documents telling orgs how to properly implement security, but literally any public communication under one of the domains)
... hecking heck no!
... At this stage I think everyone else except ENISA has control over their infrastructure.
superkuh
These days most "cyber" crimes are commited by corporations against their customers/users (just like most theft is wage theft). These small fish/phish putting sites on exploited servers are a drop in the bucket. It is sad when some university resource gets shut down because they didn't mantain it after the grad student that set it up graduates though. We really need to teach the people that set up these things to use .html pages instead of dynamic languages and databases.
neffy
Sure. Corporations commit ransomware attacks all the time.
I've noticed on some scam forums and subreddits I frequent that scammers have been using target site's own support searches to redirect users to scam phone numbers.
On both Ticketmaster and Facebook, and many other sites, when you perform a search on their support site it spits back your query in big letters at the top of the page. If you craft the correct search and then buy Google Ads pretending to be Ticketmaster, then you can redirect users to your call center and scam them. And because they link for your ad actually links to Ticketmaster the ad passes validation and appears to be a legit link in the eyes of Google.
Example of a crafted search term: https://help.ticketmaster.com/hc/en-us/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93...