Cybercrime groups continue to flourish on Facebook
Researchers with Ciscos Talos security research team have uncovered a wave of Facebook groups dedicated to making money from a variety of illicit and otherwise sketchy online behaviors, including phishing schemes, trading hacked credentials and spamming.
For example, Talos found posts openly selling credit card numbers with three-digit CVV codes, some with accompanying photos of the cards owner.
The majority of these groups use fairly obvious group names, including Spam Professional, Spammer & Hacker Professional, Buy Cvv On THIS SHOP PAYMENT BY BTC , and Facebook hack . Despite the fairly obvious names, some of these groups have managed to remain on Facebook for up to eight years, and in the process acquire tens of thousands of group members.
Beyond the sale of stolen credentials, Talos documented users selling shell accounts for governments and organizations, promoting their expertise in moving large sums of money and offering to create fake passports and other identifying documents.
While some groups were removed immediately, other groups only had specific posts removed, Talos researcher Jaeson Schultz wrote.
Eventually, through contact with Facebooks security team, the majority of malicious groups was quickly taken down, however new groups continue to pop up, and some are still active as of the date of publishing.
Cybercrime groups are yet another example of the game of enforcement whack-a-mole that Facebook continues to play on its massive platform. At the social networks scale and without the company dedicating sufficient resources to more comprehensive detection methods its difficult for Facebook to track the kinds of illicit or potentially harmful behaviors that flourish in unmonitored corners of its sprawling platform.
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