Cybercrime
14 articles
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CybercrimeThe Cybercriminal Underground: Mapping the Healthcare Data Economy
A look inside an industrialized economy where stolen healthcare data is bought, sold, and weaponized, from ransomware breaches to broker access and fake medical documents fueling an expanding criminal supply chain.
June 4th, 2026Stephen Hilt, Numaan Huq, Mayra Rosario Fuentes
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Vulnerabilities And ExploitsThe Industrialization of Botnets: Automation and Scale as a New Threat Infrastructure
Today’s botnet operations, enabled by automation and shared resources, are outpacing traditional response and patching models. This highlights the growing importance of security capabilities that can match the speed and scale of these attacks.
February 26th, 2026Ashish Verma, Deep Patel, Simon Dulude
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AI and Emerging TechnologiesThe Next Phase of Cybercrime: Agentic AI and the Shift to Autonomous Criminal Operations
We dive into the transformation from “Cybercrime-as-a-Service“ to “Cybercrime-as-a-Sidekick“, which fundamentally alters the operational dynamics of criminal enterprises.
December 9th, 2025 6 minStephen Hilt, Robert McArdle
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AI and Emerging TechnologiesReimagining Fraud Operations: The Rise of AI-Powered Scam Assembly Lines
Trend™ Research replicated an AI-powered scam assembly line to reveal how AI is eradicating the barrier for entry to running scams, making fraud easier to run, harder to detect, and effortless to scale.
November 18th, 2025 18 minRoel Reyes, Numaan Huq, Salvatore Gariuolo
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AI and Emerging TechnologiesThe Devil Reviews Xanthorox: A Criminal-Focused Analysis of the Latest Malicious LLM Offering
Xanthorox AI: flirty, menacing, and potentially devastating? We explored the inner workings of this LLM to unveil its devious capabilities for generating malicious code, obtaining private information, and roleplaying.
November 11th, 2025 15 minDavid Sancho, Vincenzo Ciancaglini, Salvatore Gariuolo
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CybercrimeComplexity and Visibility Gaps in Power Automate
Amid the rise of low-code automation, Microsoft Power Automate is becoming an attractive target for cybercriminals exploiting its complexity to evade detection and exfiltrate data – but demand for compromised enterprise assets is outstripping supply in the cybercriminal underground.
September 7th, 2025Stephen Hilt, Vladimir Kropotov, Fyodor Yarochkin, Benjamin Zigh
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CybercrimeUnmasking Task Scams to Prevent Financial Fallout From Fraud
This report exposes the life cycle and tactics of task scams by presenting real-world cases as well as strategies to help identify and avoid these threats.
August 19th, 2025 20 minChristoper Boyton, Mayra Rosario Fuentes
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AI and Emerging TechnologiesDeepfake It ‘til You Make It: A Comprehensive View of the New AI Criminal Toolset
This report takes a comprehensive look at how deepfakes are used to support criminal business processes, what are the toolkits criminals are exploiting to power their deepfake creation, and what the deepfake underground looks like.
July 9th, 2025David Sancho, Salvatore Gariuolo, Vincenzo Ciancaglini
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AI and Emerging TechnologiesSlopsquatting: When AI Agents Hallucinate Malicious Packages
Our research examines how AI coding assistants can hallucinate plausible but non-existent package names—therefore enabling slopsquatting attacks—while also providing practical defense strategies that organizations can implement to secure their development pipelines
June 5th, 2025Sean Park
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CybercrimeThe Rise of Residential Proxies as a Cybercrime Enabler
This research discusses how residential proxies help cybercriminals bypass antifraud and IT security systems, and how vulnerabilities in the IoT supply chain are exploited where Android-based devices are shipped pre-infected.
May 27th, 2025Feike Hacquebord, Philippe Lin, Fyodor Yarochkin, Vladimir Kropotov
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CybercrimeUnmasking Pig-Butchering Scams and Protecting Your Financial Future
This report delves into the nature of pig-butchering scams, how scammers carry out their operations, the new pig-butchering tactics we’ve observed in the wild, and what individuals can do to avoid falling for these fraudulent investments and dealing with massive amounts of debt.
June 22nd, 2023TrendAI™ Research
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AI and Emerging TechnologiesExploiting AI: How Cybercriminals Misuse and Abuse AI and ML
We discuss the present state of the malicious uses and abuses of AI and ML and the plausible future scenarios in which cybercriminals might abuse these technologies for ill gain.
November 19th, 2020TrendAI™ Research, United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI), Europol
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CybercrimeNew Bait Used in Instagram Profile Hacking Scheme
Hackers spread messages supposedly sent from Instagram Help Center claiming that the user's account is at risk of being deleted.
August 28th, 2020Jindrich Karasek
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CybercrimeCryptocurrency Miner Uses Hacking Tool Haiduc and App Hider Xhide to Brute Force Machines and Servers
The cryptocurrency-miner, a multi-component threat comprised of different Perl and Bash scripts, miner binaries, the application hider Xhide, and a scanner tool, propagates by scanning vulnerable machines and brute-forcing (primarily default) credentials.
January 9th, 2020Augusto Remillano II, Jemimah Molina
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