Cyber Security
New Pig Butchering Scam Targets Victims, Warns Chainalysis

With several billion dollars in inflows, scams that involve cryptocurrency are mounting in 2024 and are one of the largest areas of crypto-related illicit activity year to date (YTD). This is according to new research by Chainalysis, the blockchain data company, which also found that 43% of the total YTD scam inflows have gone to wallets that only became active this year. This suggests a surge in new scams, and is a significant development given that the next highest year, 2022, saw just 29.9% of total YTD flows go to wallets that became active that year.
Also notable this year has been the marked decline in the average lifespan of scams. Between 2020 and 2024 YTD, the average number of days scams were active has significantly decreased, starting at 271 days for scams that began in 2020, and ending at 42 days so far for scams beginning in 2024. “Taken together, these two data points strongly suggest that scammers are pivoting away from elaborate Ponzi schemes that cast a wide net, to more targeted campaigns like romance scams or address poisonings,” explained Eric Jardine, Cybercrime Research Lead at Chainalysis.
Earlier this year, in its 2024 Crypto Crime Report, Chainalysis researchers estimated that based on average payment size, romance scams — also called pig butchering scams — have had the worst impact on victims, of all scam types. Also concerningly, the company’s data suggests that this type of scam activity has grown by 85x since 2020. From 2022 to 2024, just one such organisation, a popular fraud shop, received US$ 10.5 million from scammers known to perpetrate romance scams. With this shop selling ‘seasoned’ social media profiles for anything between US$5 to US$20 per account, scammers could have purchased between 525K and 2.1M social media profiles they could then use to target victims.
“The pivot away from Ponzi schemes implies that victims are now being targeted through more interpersonal channels, such as social media or text messages. On one level, this sort of tactical shift makes scammers harder to track and somewhat more challenging victim restitution. However, there are clear cases involving asset freezes and law enforcement intervention that show how victims can still be made whole. This also serves as a reminder that while it’s easy to write off targeted scams, especially romance scams, as ‘something that won’t happen to me’, any individual can be a target. It is therefore important to stay on guard and be especially wary of communications from people you weren’t expecting to hear from — no matter how innocent their messages may seem. Engaging in a dialogue doesn’t mean you are being scammed but as soon as there is a request for transfer of monetary funds, it should raise red flags,” added Jardine.
Moreover, as Chainalysis has demonstrated, the transparency of blockchains has proven to be an incredibly powerful tool in understanding and uncovering the modus operandi of cybercriminals. “We closely monitor the crypto crime ecosystem, in collaboration with our partners, to shine a light on illicit activity. In doing so, we will continue to work with law enforcement agencies and cryptocurrency exchanges with the intelligence and tools to disrupt and prevent these scams,” concluded Jardine.
Cyber Security
GISEC Global 2025: Phishing, Data Breaches, Ransomware, and Supply Chain Attacks Causing Challenges

Maher Jadallah, the Vice President for Middle East and North Africa at Tenable, says effective exposure management requires a unified view of the entire attack surface (more…)
Cyber Security
GISEC Global 2025: A Place Where Innovation, Partnerships, and Leadership Come Together

Meriam ElOuazzani, the Senior Regional Director for META at SentinelOne, says, the company will showcase its latest developments in AI-powered security solutions, reinforcing its position as a leader in this area (more…)
Artificial Intelligence
Cequence Intros Security Layer to Protect Agentic AI Interactions

Cequence Security has announced significant enhancements to its Unified API Protection (UAP) platform to deliver a comprehensive security solution for agentic AI development, usage, and connectivity. This enhancement empowers organizations to secure every AI agent interaction, regardless of the development framework. By implementing robust guardrails, the solution protects both enterprise-hosted AI applications and external AI APIs, preventing sensitive data exfiltration through business logic abuse and ensuring regulatory compliance.
There is no AI without APIs, and the rapid growth of agentic AI applications has amplified concerns about securing sensitive data during their interactions. These AI-driven exchanges can inadvertently expose internal systems, create significant vulnerabilities, and jeopardize valuable data assets. Recognising this critical challenge, Cequence has expanded its UAP platform, introducing an enhanced security layer to govern interactions between AI agents and backend services specifically. This new layer of security enables customers to detect and prevent AI bots such as ChatGPT from OpenAI and Perplexity from harvesting organizational data.
Internal telemetry across Global 2000 deployments shows that the overwhelming majority of AI-related bot traffic, nearly 88%, originates from large language model infrastructure, with most requests obfuscated behind generic or unidentified user agents. Less than 4% of this traffic is transparently attributed to bots like GPTBot or Gemini. Over 97% of it comes from U.S.-based IP addresses, highlighting the concentration of risk in North American enterprises. Cequence’s ability to detect and govern this traffic in real time, despite the lack of clear identifiers, reinforces the platform’s unmatched readiness for securing agentic AI in the wild.
Key enhancements to Cequence’s UAP platform include:
- Block unauthorized AI data harvesting: Understanding that external AI often seeks to learn by broadly collecting data without obtaining permission, Cequence provides organizations with the critical capability to manage which AI, if any, can interact with their proprietary information.
- Detect and prevent sensitive data exposure: Empowers organizations to effectively detect and prevent sensitive data exposure across all forms of agentic AI. This includes safeguarding against external AI harvesting attempts and securing data within internal AI applications. The platform’s intelligent analysis automatically differentiates between legitimate data access during normal application usage and anomalous activities signaling sensitive data exfiltration, ensuring comprehensive protection against AI-related data loss.
- Discover and manage shadow AI: Automatically discovers and classifies APIs from agentic AI tools like Microsoft Copilot and Salesforce Agentforce, presenting a unified view alongside customers’ internal and third-party APIs. This comprehensive visibility empowers organizations to easily manage these interactions and effectively detect and block sensitive data leaks, whether from external AI harvesting or internal AI usage.
- Seamless integration: Integrates easily into DevOps frameworks for discovering internal AI applications and generates OpenAPI specifications that detail API schemas and security mechanisms, including strong authentication and security policies. Cequence delivers powerful protection without relying on third-party tools, while seamlessly integrating with the customer’s existing cybersecurity ecosystem. This simplifies management and security enforcement.
“Gartner predicts that by 2028, 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI, up from less than 1% in 2024, enabling 15% of day-to-day work decisions to be made autonomously. We’ve taken immediate action to extend our market-leading API security and bot management capabilities,” said Ameya Talwalkar, CEO of Cequence. “Agentic AI introduces a new layer of complexity, where every agent behaves like a bidirectional API. That’s our wheelhouse. Our platform helps organizations embrace innovation at scale without sacrificing governance, compliance, or control.”
These extended capabilities will be generally available in June.
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