To honor Black History Month, Insikt Group partnered with BEST@RF (Black Empowerment and Support Team) — an employee resource group at Recorded Future that advocates for Black and ethnic minority employees — to conduct research into cyber threats facing the Black community within the United States. The goal of this research is to raise awareness and visibility, as well as provide practical recommendations to aid the Black community in battling the threats they face as a result of systemic racism.

Executive Summary

La communauté noire est souvent plus durement touchée par les crises sanitaires ou financières que d'autres groupes en raison des importantes inégalités économiques liées au racisme systémique qui existe depuis des siècles. La pandémie actuelle de COVID-19 en est un exemple flagrant, puisque les Afro-Américains, compte tenu de leur âge, sont deux fois plus susceptibles de décéder de la COVID-19 que les Américains blancs. En appliquant ce contexte au paysage des cybermenaces, Insikt Group a enquêté sur un large éventail de cybermenaces au cours des six dernières années, notamment des fraudes, des campagnes de logiciels malveillants et des opérations de désinformation, afin de trouver des preuves d'un ciblage disproportionné ou intentionnel de la communauté noire par des cybercriminels, des groupes soutenus par des États ou des acteurs malveillants affiliés à des nations.

Key Judgements

• Members of the Black community are highly impacted by fraud campaigns compared to other racial and ethnic groups, as disparities in financial literacy and wealth are large barriers to recovering from any resulting financial loss.
• The use of phishing lures based on trending current events extends to social justice movements such as Black Lives Matter. Threat actors will continue to use the movement to victimize users as long as it is lucrative.
• The infrastructure of organizations advocating for racial justice and equality are frequently targets for distributed denial of service attacks. The volume of attempted cyberattacks against these organizations is highly correlated with trends in racial justice movements, as evidenced by a surge in cyberattacks following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 and subsequent protests.
• Foreign information operations have targeted the Black community since at least 2015 and will likely continue to do so in order to create division and political unrest and undermine political leadership.