The US government has recovered more than $15 million in earnings from the 3ve digital advertising fraud enterprise, which cost firms more than $29 million in unviewed ads. 

Sergey Ovsyannikov, Yevgeniy Timchenko, and Aleksandr Isaev, according to the Justice Department, accessed more than 1.7 million infected computers between December 2015 and October 2018, using tens of command and control (C&C) servers as the Kovter botnet, a click-fraud malware would quietly run in the background while connecting to sites to consume advertisements. 

A forfeiture order, according to the Justice Department, resulted in the transfer of $15,111,453.84 from Swiss bank accounts to the US government. The technique resulted in the falsification of billions of ad views and the spoofing of over 86,000 domains. According to the US Department of Justice, groups paid over $29 million for advertising never seen by real people. 

Ovsyannikov and Timchenko were arrested in 2018, pleaded guilty, and sentenced to jail terms in the United States. For this role in 3ve (pronounced "Eve"), Isaev and five others are accused of money laundering, wire fraud, computer intrusion, and identity theft, yet they stay free. 

The US also charged Aleksandr Zhukov, Boris Timokhin, Mikhail Andreev, Denis Avdeev, and Dmitry Novikov, five Russian citizens, with running the Methbot ad fraud scheme, which is thought to have netted the fraudsters more than $7 million in illegal gains. 

"This forfeiture is the greatest international cybercrime recovery in the Eastern District of New York's history," said United States Attorney Peace in a press statement.

According to research published Thursday by Trustwave's SpiderLabs team, a newly uncovered phishing campaign aims to reassure potential victims that submitting credit card details and other personal information is safe. 

As per the research, instead of just embedding an information-stealing link directly in an email or attached document, the procedure involves a "chatbot-like" page that tries to engage and create confidence with the victim. 

Researcher Adrian Perez stated, “We say ‘chatbot-like’ because it is not an actual chatbot. The application already has predefined responses based on the limited options given.” 

Responses to the phoney bot lead the potential victim through a number of steps that include a false CAPTCHA, a delivery service login page, and finally a credit card information grab page. Some of the other elements in the process, like the bogus chatbot, aren't very clever. According to SpiderLabs, the CAPTCHA is nothing more than a jpeg file. However, a few things happen in the background on the credit card page. 

“The credit card page has some input validation methods. One is card number validation, wherein it tries to not only check the validity of the card number but also determine the type of card the victim has inputed,” Perez stated.

The campaign was identified in late March, according to the business, and it was still operating as of Thursday morning. The SpiderLabs report is only the latest example of fraudsters' cleverness when it comes to credit card data. In April, Trend Micro researchers warned that fraudsters were utilising phoney "security alerts" from well-known banks in phishing scams. 

Last year, discussions on dark web forums about deploying phishing attacks to capture credit card information grew, according to Gemini Advisory's annual report. Another prevalent approach is stealing card info directly from shopping websites. Researchers at RiskIQ claimed this week that they've noticed a "constant uptick" in skimming activity recently, albeit not all of it is linked to known Magecart malware users.

The Conti ransomware organization, which has hacked some Costa Rican government computer systems, has increased its threat, claiming that its ultimate goal is to overthrow the government. The Russian-speaking Conti gang tried to intensify the pressure to pay a ransom by boosting its demand to $20 million, perhaps capitalizing on the fact that President Rodrigo Chaves had just been in office for a week. 

"We are aiming to overthrow the government by a cyber attack, and we have already demonstrated all of our strength and power," the group stated on its official website. "In your government, we have insiders. We're also attempting to obtain access to your other systems, and you have no choice but to pay us." Chaves said the organization had infiltrated up to 27 institutions at various levels of government, declaring that the country was "at war" with the Conti ransomware gang but giving no indication that the ransom would be paid. 

"I appeal to every Costa Rican to go to your government and organize rallies to demand that they pay us as soon as possible if your existing government is unable to fix the situation?" A different statement on Conti's dark web page stated, "Perhaps it's worth replacing." Over the weekend, the ransomware issued a warning that it will remove the decryption keys in a week, making it impossible for Costa Rica to restore access to the ransomware-encrypted files. 

The lethal April 19 attack prompted the new administration to proclaim a state of emergency, and the gang has exposed troves of data acquired from infected systems before encryption. Conti linked the attack to an affiliate actor nicknamed "UNC1756," a play on the name given to uncategorized threat groups by threat intelligence firm Mandiant. 

If it was any other ransomware gang, according to Aaron Turner, vice president of SaaS posture at Vectra, an AI cybersecurity firm, the threat would be unnoticeable. "However, because it's Conti, and Conti has publicly connected themselves with Putin's Russia's military activities, this threat should demand a second look," he said. 

He believes that if the US supports 'enemy' troops in Russia's neighborhood, there is a strong urge for retaliation. "Fortunately for Costa Rica, Conti isn't the most sophisticated gang of ransomware operators," he said. "Costa Rica is also lucky in that Russia's invasion of Ukraine went so badly that there are likely inadequate military forces on the other side of the planet to launch a combined cyberattack and conventional strike." While the prospect of overthrow is intriguing from an academic standpoint, Turner believes the chances of Conti orchestrating a coup are extremely remote. 

Affiliates are hacker organizations that rent access to pre-developed ransomware tools to coordinate assaults on corporate networks as part of the so-called ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) gig economy, and then share the profits with the operators. Conti has continued to target companies all over the world after suffering a large data breach of its own earlier this year amid its public support for Russia in its current war against Ukraine. 

Conti is the "most prolific ransomware-associated cybercriminal activity organization operational today," according to Microsoft's security team, which records the cybercriminal gang under the cluster DEV-0193. "DEV-0193 has hired developers from other malware operations that have shut down for varied reasons, including legal actions. The addition of developers from Emotet, Qakbot, and IcedID to the DEV-0193 umbrella is very noteworthy." 

Conti is one of the most wanted cybercriminal gangs in the world, with the US State Department offering up to $10 million in incentives for any information leading to the identity of its senior members.