How cyber criminals use Facebook for their business

Facebook has always been a hotbed for misinformation, misinformation, conspiracy theories, fraudulent advertisements and hate groups, but apparently it also has a cybercrime problem.

Ultimately, illegal cybercrime services are not only available in the bowels of the dark network – they are also openly and blatantly advertised in Facebook groups and pages!

The worst thing about this news is that Facebook is not doing enough to control these groups. Read on and see why we need to stop these burgeoning cybercrime markets within Facebook.

Groups of cybercriminals spotted on Facebook again

A new study by security researchers at Talos, Cisco, shows that Facebook remains a prime location for groups offering dubious services such as selling and exchanging credit and bank card information and banking, account information, stolen identities, as well as spam and phishing tools.

In total, Talos was able to compile a list of 74 groups on Facebook that peddled various illegal and unethical cybercrime activities.

Other groups also served as discussion platforms for tools and techniques for spam and phishing. In total, these groups brought together approximately 385,000 members.

Talos noted that anyone with a Facebook account was able to easily locate these groups via a simple search. Keywords such as "spam", "carding" or "CVV" often generate multiple occurrences. Once joined, Facebook's algorithms even suggest groups of similar cybercriminals.

Many of these groups even used obvious names such as "Spam Professional", "Spammer & Hacker Professional" and "Facebook hack (Phishing)". And shockingly, despite these names, some of these groups have been able to maintain their presence on Facebook for eight years.

A growing market for cybercrime

Talos also wrote that many activities on the Facebook pages reported were "totally illegal".

Some were blatantly selling credit card numbers with their CVV and sometimes even IDs and photos of their original owners.

Other cybercriminal services included spammers selling access to large e-mail lists, criminals offering money laundering services, falsifying documents and IDs, and selling fictitious accounts. various institutions, including governmental organizations.

Some of the Facebook sellers apparently acted as middlemen who took a share of the profits and used PayPal as a preferred means of payment. However, almost always, the payment method consisted of cryptocurrencies.

Even though there seems to be a lot of complaints that some of the services offered were scams, which means the promised products have not been delivered, Talos has verified that some of the promotional spam tools being hawked are really authentic.

In one example, a Facebook publication belonging to one of these groups offered a spam advertising service that promised to send an Apple phishing email to targeted Hotmail and Yahoo accounts. Talos researchers were then able to locate and verify this same phishing email in the wild.

Some of these Facebook posts may have been wrong, but some were the real deal.

The cybercrime activity on Facebook is not a new problem

At the time of writing these lines, it appears that the 74 Facebook cybercriminal groups exposed by the Talos report have been removed. However, this is not the first time that cybercriminal groups are facing Facebook upheaval.

Last year, the security blog KrebsOnSecurity forced Facebook to remove 120 private groups of more than 300,000 members, who blindly promoted a range of similar illegal cybercrime activities, including account takeover, spamming , electronic fraud, fake tax refunds, denial of service attacks, etc. botnet creation and more.

Who will insure the police on these Facebook groups?

Based on these repeated occurrences, it seems like cybercriminal groups on Facebook are appearing continuously, and this is practically a whack-a-mole game every time.

The sad reality is that while social media services like Facebook provide tools for connecting people around the world, these same tools can also be exploited for harmful purposes.

The worst thing is that even with its moderators and algorithms, Facebook seems to prefer that its users control their own content.

But as it has been proven time and time again, self checking is virtually impossible. Do not you think that social media sites should more effectively protect their users from harmful content?

For its part, here is the official statement of Facebook:

"These groups have violated our policies against spam and financial fraud and we have removed them. We know that we need to be more vigilant and invest heavily to fight this type of activity. "

Hopefully these changes will come sooner than later.

The traumatic life of a Facebook moderator

This is no secret, Facebook has struggled to moderate all content circulating on the site. With billions of active users, the number of messages that the company must filter is astronomical. To do this, they hire moderators who scan all the content to eliminate anything that could be violent or pornographic. A new report indicates that these moderators are experiencing effects that you may not have thought of. Do you think you could handle what these people have to go through?

Click or tap to know its impact on Facebook moderators.