The text above was the lead for a story published April 3, 2006 in The New York Times. It described Zo0mer as a “kingpin” of the criminal underworld market for stolen identities and credit cards.
What’s remarkable is how — almost four years later — Zo0mer’s business is now stronger than ever.
This time of year, it seems like everyone has a guide on how to shop safely online. Most of these tip sheets focus on ways to spot insecure Web sites and harden your computer against data-stealing malware, but it’s equally important to research the reputation of the merchant before it’s too late.
Criminals have been conducting complex, targeted e-mail attacks against employees at more than 100 e-mail service providers (ESPs) over the past several months in a bid to hijack computers at companies that market directly to customers of some of the world’s largest corporations, anti-spam experts warn.
The attacks are a textbook example of how organized thieves can abuse trust relationships between companies to access important resources that are then recycled in future attacks.
An escrow firm in Missouri is suing its bank to recover $440,000 that organized cyber thieves stole in an online robbery earlier this year, claiming the bank’s reliance on passwords to secure high-dollar transactions failed to measure up to federal e-banking security guidelines.
Criminals increasingly are cannibalizing parts from handheld audio players and cheap spy cams to make extremely stealthy and effective ATM skimmers, devices designed to be attached to cash machines and siphon card +PIN data on the sly, a report released last week warned.
Adobe has at long last released Reader X, a fortified version of its PDF Reader software that is built to withstand attacks from the sort of zero-day security vulnerabilities that repeatedly have threatened its user base over the past several years.
Once or twice each year, some security company trots out a “study” that counts the number of vulnerabilities that were found and fixed in widely used software products over a given period and then pronounces the most profligate offenders in a Top 10 that is supposed to tell us something useful about the relative security of these programs. And nearly without fail, the security press parrots this information as if it were newsworthy.
Adobe on Tuesday issued a critical update to patch at least two security holes in its PDF Reader and Acrobat software, including one flaw that was publicly disclosed earlier this month. Updates are available for Windows, Mac and UNIX versions… Read More »
Last week, I wrote about a “bulletproof hosting” provider that offers dodgy Web hosting that is insulated from takedown by abuse complaints or requests from Western law enforcement agencies. Today, I’ll look at one of that bulletproof provider’s biggest clients: Captchabot.com, a service that automates the solving of “CAPTCHAs,” those annoying agglomerations of squiggly numbers and letters that many online services require users to solve to help ensure that new accounts are not being auto-created by a computer.
Apple recently released a massive update to address at least 130 security vulnerabilities in Mac OS X systems, including a monster patch that fixes 55 flaws in Adobe Flash Player. The seventh major update to OS X this year includes… Read More »
