Last year saw an explosion in spear-phishing attempts and the use of social media as a tool for malicious activities online, according to the annual report from the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3)
The FBI cyber center has a busy 2014, receiving an average of 22,000 complaints of cyber crime a month and fielding its 3 millionth online complaint since its creation in 2000.
Report: 2014 Internet Crime Report
The center estimates the 269,422 complaints lodged in 2014 led to some $800 million in losses. While large, this number is only a fraction of the true cost of Internet crime, as IC3 estimates only 15 percent of U.S. incidents are reported.
The number of complaints rose slightly from 2013 (262,813) but is down from a high of 314,246 in 2011.
Last year saw high-profile breaches — including the Sony hack, which has been equated with cyber terrorism — and the rise of spear-phishing, in which bad actors send specially-crafted emails and social media messages to try and get personal information from users.
More: Former fed charged in spear-phishing attempt on colleagues
Some 12 percent of complaints filed in 2014 included a social media dimension, four times as many as reported in 2009. This method is often used to cull together enough information about a target to initiate a spear-phishing attempt to obtain passwords or personally identifiable information.
“The increased use of social media has provided a quintessential goldmine of personal data for perpetrators,” the report states. “More victims are submitting complaints documenting how social media was utilized to perpetrate frauds or indicating the perpetrator initiated a relationship through social engineering.”
In a variation on this, IC3 saw a spike in the number of complaints citing emails purporting to be from high-ranking government officials or federal agencies. The center fielded an average of 16 of these complaints a day in 2014, with an average loss of $1,450 per incident.
More: Spear-phishing tactics becoming more sophisticated
The majority of these types of emails pretended to be from former Attorney General Eric Holder or FBI Director James Comey.
The report notes government agencies do not send unsolicited emails asking for information, so such requests should be treated as suspect.
The report also notes the rise of digital currencies, which are being used to pay for illegal goods and services online but also being exploited by bad actors taking advantage of vulnerabilities and the lack of legal repercussions.
More: Malware getting more advanced, easier to use in 2015
“Due to the evolving nature of Internet crime and criminals achieving new levels of sophistication, the IC3 has developed a more streamlined approach to reviewing, categorizing and analyzing complaints, which allows for new trends to be recognized more quickly,” according to the report.
The center has also established “Operation Wellspring,” which allows state and local law enforcement to coordinate on known threats and scams, and a remote access database to open up information for all law enforcement, criminal justice entities and intelligence agencies.
