Friends don’t let friends get scammed. Because cybercrime hurts us all.

What to watch out for, and how to protect yourself from malicious versions of these mobile shortcuts.

Cybercriminals set up three different CAPTCHAs that Office 365 targets must click through before the final phishing page.

Federal prosecutors charged two men with crimes that carry up to 20 years in prison.

In addition to Windows and Linux machines, a new variant of the malware now targets Mac and Android devices.

Researchers say that the campaign sidesteps end user detection and security solutions.

Researchers can detect deep fakes because they don’t convincingly mimic human blood circulation in the face:

In particular, video of a person’s face contains subtle shifts in color that result from pulses in blood circulation. You might imagine that these changes would be too minute to detect merely from a video, but viewing videos that have been enhanced to exaggerate these color shifts will quickly disabuse you of that notion. This phenomenon forms the basis of a technique called photoplethysmography, or PPG for short, which can be used, for example, to monitor newborns without having to attach anything to a their very sensitive skin.

Deep fakes don’t lack such circulation-induced shifts in color, but they don’t recreate them with high fidelity. The researchers at SUNY and Intel found that “biological signals are not coherently preserved in different synthetic facial parts” and that “synthetic content does not contain frames with stable PPG.” Translation: Deep fakes can’t convincingly mimic how your pulse shows up in your face.

The inconsistencies in PPG signals found in deep fakes provided these researchers with the basis for a deep-learning system of their own, dubbed FakeCatcher, which can categorize videos of a person’s face as either real or fake with greater than 90 percent accuracy. And these same three researchers followed this study with another demonstrating that this approach can be applied not only to revealing that a video is fake, but also to show what software was used to create it.

Of course, this is an arms race. I expect deep fake programs to become good enough to fool FakeCatcher in a few months.

Companies victimized by ransomware and firms that facilitate negotiations with ransomware extortionists could face steep fines from the U.S. federal government if the crooks who profit from the attack are already under economic sanctions, the Treasury Department warned today.

In its advisory (PDF), the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) said “companies that facilitate ransomware payments to cyber actors on behalf of victims, including financial institutions, cyber insurance firms, and companies involved in digital forensics and incident response, not only encourage future ransomware payment demands but also may risk violating OFAC regulations.”

As financial losses from cybercrime activity and ransomware attacks in particular have skyrocketed in recent years, the Treasury Department has imposed economic sanctions on several cybercriminals and cybercrime groups, effectively freezing all property and interests of these persons (subject to U.S. jurisdiction) and making it a crime to transact with them.

A number of those sanctioned have been closely tied with ransomware and malware attacks, including the North Korean Lazarus Group; two Iranians thought to be tied to the SamSam ransomware attacks; Evgeniy Bogachev, the developer of Cryptolocker; and Evil Corp, a Russian cybercriminal syndicate that has used malware to extract more than $100 million from victim businesses.

Those that run afoul of OFAC sanctions without a special dispensation or “license” from Treasury can face several legal repercussions, including fines of up to $20 million.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other law enforcement agencies have tried to discourage businesses hit by ransomware from paying their extortionists, noting that doing so only helps bankroll further attacks.

But in practice, a fair number of victims find paying up is the fastest way to resume business as usual. In addition, insurance providers often help facilitate the payments because the amount demanded ends up being less than what the insurer might have to pay to cover the cost of the affected business being sidelined for days or weeks at a time.

While it may seem unlikely that companies victimized by ransomware might somehow be able to know whether their extortionists are currently being sanctioned by the U.S. government, they still can be fined either way, said Ginger Faulk, a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of the law firm Eversheds Sutherland.

Faulk said OFAC may impose civil penalties for sanctions violations based on “strict liability,” meaning that a person subject to U.S. jurisdiction may be held civilly liable even if it did not know or have reason to know it was engaging in a transaction with a person that is prohibited under sanctions laws and regulations administered by OFAC.

“In other words, in order to be held liable as a civil (administrative) matter (as opposed to criminal), no mens rea or even ‘reason to know’ that the person is sanctioned is necessary under OFAC regulations,” Faulk said.

But Fabian Wosar, chief technology officer at computer security firm Emsisoft, said Treasury’s policies here are nothing new, and that they mainly constitute a warning for individual victim firms who may not already be working with law enforcement and/or third-party security firms.

Wosar said companies that help ransomware victims negotiate lower payments and facilitate the financial exchange are already aware of the legal risks from OFAC violations, and will generally refuse clients who get hit by certain ransomware strains.

“In my experience, OFAC and cyber insurance with their contracted negotiators are in constant communication,” he said. “There are often even clearing processes in place to ascertain the risk of certain payments violating OFAC.”

Along those lines, OFAC said the degree of a person/company’s awareness of the conduct at issue is a factor the agency may consider in assessing civil penalties. OFAC said it would consider “a company’s self-initiated, timely, and complete report of a ransomware attack to law enforcement to be a significant mitigating factor in determining an appropriate enforcement outcome if the situation is later determined to have a sanctions nexus.”

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