Tag Archives: gary warner

Who’s Behind the Bogus $49.95 Charges?

September 22, 2014

Hardly a week goes by when I don’t hear from a reader wondering about the origins of a bogus credit card charge for $49.95 or some similar amount for a product they never ordered. As this post will explain, such charges appear to be the result of crooks trying to game various online affiliate programs by using stolen credit cards.

New Clues in the Target Breach

January 29, 2014

An examination of the malware used in the Target breach suggests that the attackers may have taken advantage of a poorly secured feature built into a widely-used IT management software product that was running on the retailer’s internal network.

Firm Bankrupted by Cyberheist Sues Bank

January 8, 2014

A California escrow firm that was forced out of business last year after a $1.5 million cyberheist is now suing its former bank to recoup the lost funds.

A state-appointed receiver for the now defunct Huntington Beach, Calif. based Efficient Services Escrow has filed suit against First Foundation Bank, alleging that the bank’s security procedures were not up to snuff, and that it failed to act in good faith when it processed three fraudulent international wire transfers totaling $1,558,439 between December 2012 and February 2013.

U.S. Government Takes Down Coreflood Botnet

April 14, 2011

The U.S. Justice Department and the FBI this week were granted unprecedented authortiy to seize control over a criminal botnet that enslaved millions of computers and to use that control to disable the malicious software on infected PCs.

The target of the takedown was “Coreflood,” an infamous botnet that first emerged almost a decade ago as a high-powered virtual weapon designed to knock targeted Web sites offline. Over the years, the crooks running the botnet began using it to defraud owners of the victim PCs by stealing bank account information and draining balances.

Spam Site Registrations Flee China for Russia

March 31, 2010

A crackdown by the Chinese government on anonymous domain name registrations has chased spammers from Chinese registrars (.cn) to those that handle the registration of Russian (.ru) Web site names, new spam figures suggest. Yet, those spammy domains may soon migrate to yet another country, as Russia is set to enforce a policy similar to China’s beginning April 1.