Tag Archive for: created

UnitedHealth Exploits an ‘Emergency’ It Created

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Last Thursday, the medical colossus UnitedHealthcare applied for an emergency exemption that would fast-track its takeover of a medical practice in Corvallis, Oregon, in a letter warning regulators that the practice might close its doors if the merger were not approved right away.

Although the specific reason for the exemption request is redacted from the publicly posted version of the application, a clinic insider says the “emergency” is the same one that has plunged thousands of other health providers across the nation into a terrifying cash crunch: the weeks-long outage of UnitedHealth’s Change Healthcare clearinghouse and claims processing systems, which has halted the flow of information that enables physicians, hospitals, and other health care providers to get paid for their work. 

“Our claims processing goes through [Change], so all of a sudden there was no money coming in,” the insider, an employee of The Corvallis Clinic who did not want to be identified for fear of jeopardizing the transaction, told the Prospect. The clinic’s shareholders, who include include more than half of its 110 physicians and one of its behavioral health providers, worked without pay last week in order to “scrape together enough money to pay the staff,” the insider said, but on Thursday the shareholders explained that they weren’t sure they would be able to open the doors Monday without an emergency cash injection. “They’re praying that the sale’s going to go through and that Optum will front them the money.” 

More from Maureen Tkacik

The situation underscores the perverse state of affairs in which UnitedHealth, which comprises some 2,642 separate companies that collectively raked in $371.6 billion last year, has arguably profited from the desperation that the hacking of its Change computer systems in late February has inflicted upon the health care system. An estimated half of all health care transactions are processed or somehow otherwise touched by Change, a rollup of dozens of health care technology firms that provide 137 software applications that have been affected by the outage. 

Every dollar in revenue that has disappeared from hospitals, medical…

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Every day, half a million malware apps are created for scamming. Who’s behind them?

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HANOI: One hour. That is all the time it takes to build malicious software that can access the camera, messages, calls, storage, microphone, location, contacts — nearly everything — on a victim’s phone.

And cyber threat hunter Ngo Minh Hieu finds more than half a million of such malware apps created every day, in his work for Vietnam’s National Cyber Security Centre.

Vietnam saw a 64 per cent rise in online fraud in the first half of this year compared with the same period last year, according to the country’s Authority of Information Security.

A growing number of incidents in the last five years are related to malware, said Nguyen Quang Dong, the director of the Institute for Policy Studies and Media Development.

The flurry of fraudulent activity has landed Vietnam among the world’s top 10 cybercrime hotspots according to the Global Tech Council, the programme Talking Point found as it investigated who might be behind the malware scams that have emerged in Singapore this year.

FORMER SCAMMER BECOMES CYBER THREAT HUNTER

Between January and August, more than 1,400 victims in Singapore lost at least S$20.6 million in total, police said.

The perpetrators linked to malware scams have mostly played the role of money mules, said Ang Hua Huang, assistant superintendent at the newly operationalised anti-scam command centre run by the Singapore Police Force.

There have been teenagers arrested for suspected involvement.

WATCH: Who are the people behind malware scams? (21:58)

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Criminals Have Created Their Own ChatGPT Clones

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Krishnan says the creator of the system published a video appearing to show the chatbot operating and generating a scammy email. They were also trying to sell access to the system for $200 per month, or a yearly cost of $1,700. Krishnan says that in conversations with the developer behind FraudGPT, they claimed to have a few hundred subscribers and pushed for a sale, while the WormGPT creator appeared to have received payments into a cryptocurrency wallet address they shared. “All these projects are in their infancy,” Krishnan says. He adds, “we haven’t got much feedback” into whether people are purchasing or using the systems.

While those touting the chatbots claim they exist, it is hard to verify the makeup and legitimacy of the systems. Cybercriminal scammers are known to scam other scammers, with previous research showing that they frequently try to rip each other off, don’t provide what they claim they are selling, and offer bad customer service. Sergey Shykevich, a threat intelligence group manager at security firm Check Point, says there are some hints that people are using WormGTP. “It seems there is a real tool,” Shykevich says. The seller behind the tool is “relatively reliable” and has a history on cybercrime forums, he says.

There are more than 100 responses to one post about the WormGPT, Shykevich says, although some of these say the seller isn’t very responsive to their inquiries and others “weren’t very excited” about the system. Shykevich is less convinced about FraudGPT’s authenticity—the seller has also claimed to have systems called DarkBard and DarkBert. Shykevich says some of the posts from the seller were removed from the forums. Either way, the Check Point researcher says there’s no sign that any of the systems are more capable than ChatGPT, Bard, or other commercial LLMs.

Kelly says he believes claims about the malicious LLMs created so far are “slightly overexaggerated.” But he adds, “this is not necessarily different from what legitimate businesses do in the real world.”

Despite questions about the systems, it isn’t a surprise that cybercriminals want to get in on the LLM boom. The FBI has warned that…

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FBI says it has sabotaged hacking tool created by Russia’s elite spies

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Experts disabled the ‘Snake’ malware used by the FSB against US computers, in what could be a death blow to one of Moscow’s leading cyber espionage programs.

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