Underground cybercrime shops that sell credit and debit card accounts stolen from retailers are slashing prices and promoting their own Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales as fraudsters gear up for the busy holiday shopping season.
Banks in Europe are warning about the emergence of a rare form of ATM skimmer involving a wire-like device that is inserted through a tiny hole cut in the cash machine’s front. The hole is covered up by a fake decal, and the thieves somehow attach the device to the place inside the ATM where the customer’s card is inserted.
For the second time this month, Adobe has issued a security update for its Flash Player software. New versions are available for Windows, Mac and Linux versions of Flash. The patch provides additional protection on a vulnerability that Adobe fixed earlier this year for which attackers appear to have devised unique and active exploits.
Greetings from sunny Austin, Texas, where I’m getting ready to wrap up a week-long book tour that began in New York City, then blazed through Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle. I’ve been trying to tweet links to various media interviews about Spam Nation over the past week, but wanted to offer a more comprehensive account and to share some highlights of the tour
In April 2014, this blog featured a story about Lance Ealy, an Ohio man arrested last year for buying Social Security numbers and banking information from an underground identity theft service that relied in part on data obtained through a company owned by big-three credit bureau Experian. Earlier this week, Ealy was convicted of using the data to fraudulently claim tax refunds with the IRS in the names of more than 175 U.S. citizens, but not before he snipped his monitoring anklet and skipped town.
Microsoft today deviated from its regular pattern of releasing security updates on the second Tuesday of each month, pushing out an emergency patch to plug a security hole in all supported versions of Windows. The company urged Windows users to install the update as quickly as possible, noting that miscreants already are exploiting the weaknesses to launch targeted attacks.
The breach at office supply chain Staples impacted roughly 100 stores and was powered by some of the same criminal infrastructure seen in the intrusion disclosed earlier this year at Michaels craft stores, according to sources close to the investigation.
A quick update on my new book, Spam Nation, The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime — From Global Epidemic to Your Front Door: Amazon has named it to their “Best Books of the Month” picks for November. In addition, my publisher has graciously extended the free ZeusGard offer until Nov. 25 for the next 500 people who order more than one copy of the book.
You can’t make this stuff up: A tech support company based in the United States that outsources its work to India says its brand is being unfairly maligned by — wait for it…..tech support scammers based in India. In an added twist, the U.S.-based tech support firm claims that the trouble is related to its admittedly false statements about being a Microsoft Certified Partner — a common claim among telephone-based tech support scams.
Spammers have been working methodically to hijack large chunks of Internet real estate by exploiting a technical and bureaucratic loophole in the way that various regions of the globe keep track of the world’s Internet address ranges.
