Tag archive: phishing

Email spam has been a problem for even longer than commercial activity has been permitted on the Internet, and thanks to botnet operators, scammers, and outright cybercriminals spam has ballooned to account for the vast majority of all email. Although antispam technologies and filters have improved considerable over the years—and there have been some notable victories, like the takedown of the Rustock botnet last year—email operators and end… Read More

Discovered by Kaspersky Lab Expert David Jacoby, a complex Facebook phishing scheme first obtains access to a user's Facebook account through standard phishing methods. Once the scam artist gains access to any account, they change the user picture to the Facebook logo or icon and alter the user's name to “Facebook Security” that contains specific ascii characters to replace a few select letters. While pretending to… Read More

Another day, another scam, only the latest to come to light has been described by Intego’s Mac Security Blog as a “vast” phishing attack comprising a “well-crafted” email. Targeting anyone with an Apple ID, the bogus email, which claims to come from appleid@id.apple.com, informs recipients that their billing information records are out of date. “Failure to update your records will result in account termination,” it says. Unlike so many scam… Read More

Social networks are a seething cesspool of malicious scammers out to get you. And antivirus software maker Bitdefender wants to help keep you safe from their, grabby, grimy little mitts. Bitdefender announced this week updates to its Safego app, which the company claims is the only such software feature “that protects users on all major social networks in addition to traditional antivirus, antimalware and spam protection.” Safego,… Read More

According to new information from researchers at Symantec, a group of spammers have created a group of 87 spam-friendly, public URL shortening services and are actively using them to circumvent spam filters on popular sites. Using URL shortening scripts that are free and open source, the spammers are churning spam through the service and the public is also free to create links through the URL shorteners, perhaps an attempt to pass off the links… Read More

According to the New York Times, Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut proposed the Personal Data Protection and Breach Accountability Act of 2011 this week in order to hold businesses accountable for data breaches that put customers at personal or financial risk. This bill is directed at companies that have more than 10,000 users or customers and require the businesses to implement specific security measures as well as have a response team in… Read More

In a yearly study conducted by the Ponemon Institute and funded by Hewlett-Packard, the median cost of dealing with prevention and the repercussions of cybercrime rose from $3.8 million a year in 2010 to $5.9 million a year in 2011. Over the 50 companies in the study, the range of costs varied from $1.5 million to $36.5 million per organization. Over the four-week period of the study, all the organizations put up with 72 successful attacks a… Read More

As Web filtering and antivirus technologies get most sophisticated at identifying malware and blocking hostile Web sites, spammers and scammers are increasingly turning to individualized email attacks and customized versions of their malware to get their payloads past protection systems—and make potential victims more likely to click. According to Cisco's second-quarter Global Threat Report (PDF), the company identified almost… Read More

That Tien Truong Nguyen, age 34, was sentenced today for his role in designing websites to mock financial institutions and using those sites to scam over 38,000 victims. He worked with Romanian scammers to help drive people to the sites through email phishing. Nguyen sold the data containing the identities stolen from the fake sites to Ryan Price and Stefani Ruland. These two men setup lines of credit at GE Capital kiosks at Walmart in Northern… Read More

Mentioned in a post earlier this week on the Better Business Bureau blog, the BBB went over the most common scams that plagued U.S. and Canadian consumers over 2010. The top ranking scam is particularly predatory during the recession and takes advantage of a weak job market in the United States. Job hunter scams attempt to pitch the ability to match consumers with perfect jobs, but end up bank accounts and social security numbers for fees… Read More

White House officials were among those targeted by a recent phishing attack regarding Google's Gmail service, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. The report cited an unnamed US official as its source. Google believes that hackers attempted to trick hundreds of users of its popular web-based e-mail service into giving away their passwords. Military personnel, journalists, and Chinese human rights activists are all thought to… Read More

It's official: Sony's hacker problems are never going away. After repeat attacks to its PlayStation Network over the past month, researchers from cyber security firm F-Secure have discovered a phishing attack site hosted on a Sony server. So yes, Sony has been hacked again. This time, however, the PSN is safe. But the previous hacks to it system appear to have left Sony's entire online infrastructure vulnerable to attacks like… Read More

The FBI has issued a fraud alert about a trend of cyber-scams resulting in large unauthorized wire transfers to economic and trade companies located in the Heilongjiang province in China. From March 2010 to April 2011, the FBI has identified 20 of these incidents aimed at small- to medium-sized U.S. businesses and public institutions that have accounts at small banks and credit unions. These cases have racked up a total of $11 million in… Read More

If you bank, shop or book hotels online, it’s likely you were one of the many who received an e-mail this morning warning you of a security breach. After a hack involving marketing provider Epsilon, major companies like Chase, Barclays Bank, US Bancorp, Marriott, Ritz Carlton, Best Buy, LL Bean, Home Shopping Network, and TiVo have all released statements asking customers and subscribers to be wary of possible phishing schemes on the horizon.… Read More

According to a new report (PDF) from DNS and online security service provider OpenDNS, social networking site Facebook was the most-blocked site during 2010. In this context, blocking means that OpenDNS customers specifically configured their DNS and security services to prevent their users from connecting, presumably out of security concerns, to prevent people from wasting time at work, or using company or organizational resources… Read More