Fraud is an intentional deceiving action that is intended to provide the offender with financial or personal gain. Fraudsters use deceptive, false, unfair business practices to mislead clients for financial gain. Fraud cases vary, but the most common include mail fraud, healthcare fraud, debit and credit card fraud, voter fraud, internet fraud, elder fraud.
The case study will focus on internet fraud involving internet services or coded software specifically designed to defraud victims. There are various internet scams that the FBI has reported an increase of 17% from 2017 to 2018. The internet scams range from romance scams, Facebook impersonation scams, all to defraud people of their hard-earned cash. The case focuses on the prevalent and popular ransomware that most black hackers begin to target common folk. Ransomware infects personal computers displaying messages of warning that demand a fee be paid to open the systems. The ransomware viruses are activated by deceptive links from messages, emails, websites, among others.
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John Doe is an employee with a construction company. The office computer is used to draw and stores all the blueprints of the various construction sites. Hence, as John was going through his emails, he noticed an amazon message that claimed he had ordered a pentel arts graph gear and needed to confirm the purchase. John opened the phishing email link provided, which lead him to another website that asked for some more personal details. Upon completion, the computer got locked and demanded payment to be made to some phony address in bitcoin form or have the computer wiped everything when the timer elapses.
Like most individuals, John panics and unplugs the computer to see if the message will disappear when stated again. To his surprise, the statement did not go away even after starting the computer. Contemplating the loss the company would incur if it lost its blueprints, John seeks help from a local white hacker. The internet fraudsters used the crypto-ransomware that encrypted the files and denied the construction from accessing their files—the white hacker came equipped with all the hacking tools to reverse the ransomware or catch the perpetrators.
The hack was traced to two college students who were extorting area residence using the scheme. The IT students were arrested by the local authorities and charged. The two white males cited their motivation as the tough times COVID-19 had forced them to result in such activities. The two individuals tried to exit through fake VPNs once they realized they were being traced to but were caught using the reverse HTTP shells. They tried to clear the event logs, but the white hacker was much informed and used the reverse HTTP shells to pinpoint their exact location where they were arrested. Under Senate Bill 30, ransomware perpetrators can face up to 10 years in prison and/or be fined up to $10,000.
The white hacker decrypted the computer since the encryption was not that hard to crack. The college students did not have much experience writing the codes for the ransomware. Companies such as the construction company need to regularly back up their important files to avoid these kinds of incidences from accessing and deleting their files. Even after paying the ransom, files are not guaranteed to be returned, opened, or the computer files can still get infected, especially if the hacker was an armature – therefore, rendering all the files useless if such a hack happens and unusable due to the virus. It is recommended that such companies invest heavily in their IT infrastructure and also installing antivirus software that can flag such phishing emails and adblockers to reduce the pop-up ads.
