A very interesting article about how Discord & Telegram have become the latest to be over run by people setting up hacker networks .... Scary stuff ...
 
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/discord-telegram-hacking-rsa2021
 

Discord and Telegram are the young hacker's platforms of choice, and companies and other enterprises should consider blocking network access to those platforms in order to lower the risk of cyberattack, a security expert said at the RSA Conference this week.

"Discord is the potential future of the dark net," said Brook Chelmo, a senior strategist for network-firewall maker SonicWall. He added that "Discord's wonderful scripting engine makes moderators' lives much easier, but it also gives both attackers and defenders powerful tools."

 

Echoing what other researchers have recently discovered, Chelmo said malicious hackers are using Discord's content-delivery network (CDN) to distribute spam, house malware command-and-control servers, run bots that shill for stocks or cryptocurrencies and launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to knock websites offline.

But, Chelmo said, the most important factor is that Discord lets young hackers, both good and bad, quickly and easily share code, communicate and form communities.

 
" Discord's transparency reports show a huge surge in cybercrime and malware on the service since early 2019 "

Looks there is much in the social media space that has or will be high jacked for purposes not originally conceived. The adaptation of these avenues for disinformation and nefarious activities looks like an organic transition when TOS is not enforced.

Grey_Beard
Looks there is much in the social media space that has or will be high jacked for purposes not originally conceived. The adaptation of these avenues for disinformation and nefarious activities looks like an organic transition when TOS is not enforced.

Exactly this. How is this Discord's problem, other than perhaps more strict enforcement of TOS? How can you enforce them when there's no reporting going on in private servers? I get that bots can be hacked maliciously, but...

"Communications platforms used by hackers to communicate". Uh. Yeah.
 
Hippie software.

 
Interesting, considering Microsoft's recent effort to buy Discord apparently failed, and now this news comes out.. not suspicious at all.
 

Oh damn, discord basically replaced skype when it comes to communication with friends for me. Bad news.

Discord has been constantly adding new features to its service, and hopefully it can have that same energy to combat any spam/hacking efforts. Would hate to see it go from something like this.

Nereus
 
Interesting, considering Microsoft's recent effort to buy Discord apparently failed, and now this news comes out.. not suspicious at all.
 

What are you implying?
That Microsoft is behind Chelmo's choice of topic?

People in general flock to whatever communications platform they think is best. I'm sure similar words were written about IRC in the 90's and the multiple IM platforms in the '00s (ICQ etc.). I'm not sure what point they're trying to make that isn't obvious: hackers distribute malware through popular platforms and water is wet?

aka_STEVE_b
A very interesting article about how Discord & Telegram have become the latest to be over run by people setting up hacker networks .... Scary stuff ...
 

 

Discord and Telegram are the young hacker's platforms of choice, and companies and other enterprises should consider blocking network access to those platforms in order to lower the risk of cyberattack, a security expert said at the RSA Conference this week.

"Discord is the potential future of the dark net," said Brook Chelmo, a senior strategist for network-firewall maker SonicWall. He added that "Discord's wonderful scripting engine makes moderators' lives much easier, but it also gives both attackers and defenders powerful tools."

 

Echoing what other researchers have recently discovered, Chelmo said malicious hackers are using Discord's content-delivery network (CDN) to distribute spam, house malware command-and-control servers, run bots that shill for stocks or cryptocurrencies and launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to knock websites offline.

But, Chelmo said, the most important factor is that Discord lets young hackers, both good and bad, quickly and easily share code, communicate and form communities.

 
" Discord's transparency reports show a huge surge in cybercrime and malware on the service since early 2019 "

And somehow discord is completely unable to monitor/eliminate this behavior? Seems like it should be fairly easy to catch, no?

In the context of understanding what discord enables, the results are hardly surprising. It will be interesting to see if these services respond and develop further safety features that are effective in preventing malicious sharing... but given the breadth of their current platform, the solution may not be immediately easy.
Admittedly I have no issue with hacker groups communicating and forming communities. That alone does not constitute malicious behavior and nerds need friends too.

yeah , friend of mine their office uses discord for comms at work since covid, free to use equates in you being the product ... nothing is free and every thing free has lack luster security 

Oh my... i use discord for almost everything now...