this video is brought to you by guardio
stick around to hear more about their
cyber defense Chrome extension alright
having recently migrated away from the
video game Centric Channel identity
though I do still plan to cover gaming
topics plenty frequently I wanted to
discuss a topic that Bridges two
parallel Industries in a rather
unexpected way most of you watching this
channel I believe will be intimately
familiar with video game Trends but for
those that aren't there is this thing
called gas no not gasoline or even a
physical object gas g-a-a-s or games as
a service refers to a distribution and
business model where video games are no
longer traditional products but services
that can be discontinued or modified at
the Publisher's sole discretion now the
legality of this entire premise isn't
even fully sorted out yet there are
compelling arguments that the entire
business model is illegal with
preservation at the heart of that logic
but regardless of whether or not it's
technically sustainable in the Video
Game World to produce Services instead
of finished products and then
discontinue or modify them with
unilateral control over the entire
player base regardless of whether or not
it's sustainable for games there is
another application of this business
model cropping up in an unexpected
location that location the underground
world of cyber crime with a new
phenomenon not completely new mind you
but rapidly growing in the past year
alone called Fast and Mass fishing as a
service and malware as a service alright
before going further I'd like to once
again talk about this video's sponsor
which is guardio I talk a lot about
cyber security proactive defense and
responsible online decision making
lately a great deal of this hinges on
personal awareness and good user
practices but over the course of our
online experience we will always end up
from time to time in unsafe digital
locations maybe a compromised website a
bad Link in an email a simple mistake
who knows but when that does happen and
it will happen it's good to have
something there to pick up the slack
guardio is a Chrome extension that
offers threat tracking and online
protection browsers like Chrome which is
an extremely popular one are a very
large part of our digital lives and
guardio is meant to secure that space
because browsers also hold a tremendous
amount of our personal more information
which can compromise our security this
goes double by the way if you're someone
who likes to click save passwords or
enable all cookies when you surf the web
browsers very often store banking
information personal details login
credentials and more guardio unlike
traditional threat responses which will
react when you have already been
infiltrated or compromised Works
proactively to detect threats before
they ever reach your computer and if you
click the link down below right now
today you can have a free scan as well
as a seven day trial of the service
after that it's ten dollars per month
but the upper echelon Community will
receive 20 off on a personal note here I
didn't actually know that my own
information has been part of a data
breach recently actually multiple but
there are a few big ones including my
previous merchandise provider I didn't
know this until using guardio for those
interested you can protect up to five
different family members under one
single account and with over a million
customers already guardio is looking to
continue its mission of protecting your
browser from online threats again link
down below to install and 20 off for the
upper echelon Community big thank you to
guardio for sponsoring the channel
honestly that seemed like the best
possible sponsor choice I could ever
find for the video but with all that
said let's really Dive In Our Story
begins in 2018 though the infrastructure
for it goes as far back as 2008. when
precisely the modern version was
initiated I'm not sure but 2018 was the
year that a service known as bulletproof
link was created which revolutionized
the world of cyber crime in a way that
completely overwhelmed authorities
operating under a significant number of
aliases and mirrors such as Anthrax or
bulletproft link the exact structure of
the service remains relatively unknown
essentially it is a twisted evolution of
cybercrime closely modeled after the
long-standing and meticulously sculpted
video game blueprint of games as a
service where instead of a completed
Standalone product being developed and
sold individually or just a piece of
code that's distributed a service was
created where access to it and all
connected features of which there are
many could be given out as a time-gated
license beyond that the original
versions of the website such as
bulletproftlink.com we're offering a
hosting feature for between one hundred
and eight hundred dollars a month
determined from the website source code
while much more recently in 2021
Microsoft announced that during Research
into phishing attacks that they had
found as many as 300 000 newly created
subdomains that's newly created
subdomains enabled by bulletproof link
just to put this in perspective if even
half of that number three hundred
thousand which isn't even the entire
network just what they found in a single
run as per their own report were to be
using the minimum monthly fee it would
be 15 million dollars per month in
hosting fees alone for clarity the
service was offering what is sometimes
referred to as a vertically integrated
cyber crime solution where users who
obtained access to the website could
purchase a template host that template
on a subdomain and then bombard known
data breach email listings or Target
lists from the dark web all inside a
simple easy to use interface now in some
of my prior videos I received feedback
from the audience that my huge
disclaimers about how I researched these
topics and why basically my methodology
she right at the beginning of the Video
Killed the pacing kind of so with that
in mind I have a much smaller disclaimer
right now for my most recent topic an
investigation into a sort of
exploitation ring inside Google photos I
actually met with an FBI Task Force
officer to hand off all of my findings
during that meeting we had a whole
session about personal security and what
my IP address is because when they raid
people they want to be able to know that
the person they are now investigating
was actually the source who told them
about it in the first place basically if
they start taking people down who are
visitors of that website or album or
whatever it is it avoids the awkward
explaining needed to justify why my IP
had shown up at all also please don't
worry some people were saying watch out
for fake law enforcement but these were
actual FBI Personnel here I did verify
that now none of that actually mattered
though because I use a VPN all the time
anyway but it made me realize that I
need to have some shall we say
guidelines for looking into this stuff
for bulletproof Link in particular it
didn't matter because I don't have
access to the site itself on top of that
there there's been a significant
Crackdown on that particular service by
the Department of Justice in 2021 with
multiple offenders as well as Founders
pleading guilty and being sentenced to I
think 20 years in prison this was with
regards to their work on the initial
infrastructure of bulletproof link from
20 2008 to 2015 but the point stands I
really don't need to take precautions
with that one because unless I go
hunting through the dark web for
contemporary mirrors of the prior
service I'm not really in danger however
for the next subject and the second half
of the video it does matter to be clear
bulletproof links services and hosting
providers are still very much active an
investigation by Trend Micro looking at
one such perpetrator offering that type
of infrastructure known as void Griffin
revealed that bulletproof hosting
regardless of individual provider is
absolutely critical to sustained cyber
crime scamming phishing or denial of
service attacks that word's important
though so let's focus in on phishing for
two reasons anyone who doesn't know what
fishing is it's an attempt to trick
people into divulging critical personal
info information online Often by
impersonating reputable brands or
companies and almost always through
email in a more dangerous form it's
called spear phishing where an
individual is targeted with a carefully
sculpted ploy to manipulate them but the
widespread version of regular fishing is
kind of our Focus for today the first
reason to focus on that particular
subset of cyber crime is because fishing
has absolutely exploded in recent years
according to the apwg the anti-fishing
working group there were over 300 000
attacks in December of 2021 alone up
over 300 percent from as recently as
early 2020. that's a colossal increase
that far outpaces the relative adoption
of online services from a global
perspective meaning that cybercrime is
growing faster than the actual growth
rate of Internet affluent users which is
not a good thing reason number two
however is even more important because
phishing is widely recognized as the
primary Gateway for nearly all cyber
crime allowing user systems corporate
systems or other targets to be
infiltrated the data here is actually
kind of terrifying according to hiscox
an insurance company so they would know
about these kinds of stats nearly three
quarters of all businesses targeted by
Ransom attacks in the United States
achieved through phishing as an entry
point broke down and paid the money
which means that there is not only an
explosive rise in the amount of fishing
but also an incredibly profitable reason
and infrastructure or foundation for
that growth to continue stats on this
are kind of hard to find but as an
example translated by a viewer who
helped me with this part of the video
data from Germany shows that 50 percent
of small to mid-sized companies on a
national scale for that country simply
don't have email protection in place
whatsoever and Global statistics on
phishing indicate that while there are
over 300 000 attacks every month in 2021
there are an estimated 3.4 billion
emails sent per day almost half of all
emails sent in the entire year of 2021
were phishing emails causing ninety
percent of data breaches and before I go
too far with regurgitated statistics all
summarized by saying that phishing is
quite obviously growing at a near
exponential Pace because it is an
effective and extremely profitable
gateway to higher level cyber crime so
how and why is that possible well it's
possible in large part because of
phishing as a service and in 2022 a new
threat actor has emerged which is likely
gaining rapid market share in the space
and contributing to a parabolic rise of
this plague that actor is called
caffeine caffeine is a pre-configured
and campaign-ready end-to-end
implementation of phishing which has
only just now as in the same month that
this video is being published gained
widespread attention the service
primarily targets Microsoft 365 which is
a fairly common and extremely popular
attack Vector with completely managed
campaigns a clean dashboard and constant
Updates this is why I had that
disclaimer by the way someone sent me
what I suppose would be a secret link to
the service so I could access it if I
wanted and my impulse was to get an
account by the software and showcase it
to the world right here in the video
yeah that thought evaporated in about
three seconds flat because I realized
that even if I tell myself and the
audience that I'm gonna do this to raise
awareness I would still be quite
literally buying a fishing subscription
service and if law enforcement shows up
at my door I really don't want to deal
with that I fully understand it would
probably make the video more I don't
know impactful and engaging or
entertaining at least to show the inner
workings of this cyber crime platform
right there in the open on the screen
but the truth of the matter is on the
heels of my chat with the FBI I just
don't have the confidence to do that on
this one I honestly I don't still
without personally buying the malware
and going down that rabbit hole I wanted
to talk about it because caffeine is
giving rise among other services to an
explosion in cyber crime that I don't
think we're actually prepared for this
is the easiest that fishing has ever
been for people with even a couple
hundred dollars and a slight tiny little
criminal inclination the caffeine
service will successfully impersonate
Major Brands like netease or Microsoft
soft and with email phishing being the
gateway to nearly all major subsequent
attacks I could cite many alarming
statistics about this but I'll summarize
Global damages from cybercrime are
projected to be 7 trillion dollars in
2022 alone just for perspective if that
number were to be the GDP of a country
it would be the third largest economy on
Earth behind the United States and China
there are other services Beyond caffeine
it's not unique or alone in what it
offers not by a long shot another
example would be a service called evil
proxy that even bypasses two-factor
authentication pretty sure that's the
one helping cause a massive spread of
compromised YouTube channels that get
repurposed into crypto scams I have a
video on that as well if you've ever
seen like a popular channel that you
used to follow just turn into a crypto
scam and then start live streaming it
yeah odds are they got hacked and they
bypass two-factor authentication I think
with evil proxy so that's a whole
different thing maybe I'll do a video on
that I don't know but as an emerging
option caffeine is with clean results
and effective design it is attributing
to a widespread cybercrime epidemic that
outpaces organic user growth for online
activities in general and dramatically
increases faster than the efforts to
stop it can respond bottom line here
protecting yourself and becoming the
overly skeptical stick in the mud kind
of person or friend everybody knows that
type of person with everything that
exists online has literally never been
as important as it is today better that
you treat a thousand real people with
suspicion that they don't necessarily
deserve and be wrong then treat just one
person as legitimate that isn't when it
comes to online activity we could all
use a little less trust that's it if you
want to support their links down below
primarily locals and patreon to give me
money if you want to or Odyssey a
YouTube platform alternative also
another YouTuber to check out who makes
great videos the video sponsor for those
of you using Chrome do check that out
and social media as well merchandise Etc
et cetera but I'll cut it there and stop
rambling as always thank you all for
watching and have a nice night
[Music]
thank you
[Music]