Tag Archives: Paypal

Buying Battles in the War on Twitter Spam

August 14, 2013

The success of social networking community Twitter has given rise to an entire shadow economy that peddles dummy Twitter accounts by the thousands, primarily to spammers, scammers and malware purveyors. But new research on identifying bogus accounts has helped Twitter to drastically deplete the stockpile of existing accounts for sale, and holds the promise of driving up costs for both vendors of these shady services and their customers.

Cashout Service for Ransomware Scammers

June 3, 2013

There are 1,001 ways to swindle people online, but the hardest part for crooks is converting those ill-gotten gains into cash. A new service catering to purveyors of ransomware — malware that hijacks PCs until victims pay a ransom – levees a hefty fee for laundering funds from these scams, and it does so by abusing a legitimate Web site that allows betting on dog and horse races in the United States.

Ragebooter: ‘Legit’ DDoS Service, or Fed Backdoor?

May 16, 2013

On Monday, I profiled asylumbooter.com, one of several increasingly public DDoS-for-hire services posing as Web site “stress testing” services. Today, we’ll look at ragebooter.net, yet another attack service except for one secret feature which sets it apart from the competition: According the site’s proprietor, ragebooter.net includes a hidden backdoor that lets the FBI monitor customer activity.

‘Booter Shells’ Turn Web Sites into Weapons

August 10, 2012

Hacked Web sites aren’t just used for hosting malware anymore. Increasingly, they are being retrofitted with tools that let miscreants harness the compromised site’s raw server power for attacks aimed at knocking other sites offline.

It has long been standard practice for Web site hackers to leave behind a Web-based “shell,” a tiny “backdoor” program that lets them add, delete and run files on compromised server. But in a growing number of Web site break-ins, the trespassers also are leaving behind simple tools called “booter shells,” which allow the miscreants to launch future denial-of-service attacks without the need for vast networks of infected zombie computers.

A Closer Look: Email-Based Malware Attacks

June 21, 2012

Nearly every time I write about a small to mid-sized business that has lost hundreds of thousands of dollars after falling victim to a malicious software attack, readers ask how the perpetrators broke through the victim organization’s defenses, and which type of malware paved the way. Normally, victim companies don’t know or disclose that information, so to get a better idea, I’ve put together a rough profile of the top daily email-based malware attacks over the past month.

Banking on Badb in the Underweb

March 8, 2012

Underground Web sites can be a useful barometer for the daily volume of criminal trade in goods like stolen credit card numbers and hijacked PayPal or eBay accounts. And if the current low prices at one of Underweb’s newer and… Read More »

How Much is That Phished PayPal Account?

October 5, 2011

Compromised PayPal accounts are a valuable commodity in the criminal underground, and crooks frequently trade them in shadowy online forums. But it wasn’t until recently that I finally encountered a proper Web site dedicated to selling hacked PayPal accounts.

Many of the PayPal accounts for sale at iProfit.su have a zero balance, but according to the proprietor of this shop these are all “verified.” PayPal “verifies” an account when a customer agrees to attach a bank account to it; PayPal then sends a micropayment the bank account, and asks the user the value of that mini deposit. A bonus feather: all the hacked PayPal profiles currently for sale at iProfit.su are advertised as having a credit card attached to them, which is another way PayPal accounts can be verified.

The creator of iProfit.su also advertises private, bulk sales of unverified PayPal accounts; currently he is selling these at $50 per 100 accounts – a bargain at only 50 cents apiece.

Rent-a-Bot Networks Tied to TDSS Botnet

September 6, 2011

Criminals who operate large groupings of hacked PCs tend to be a secretive lot, and jealously guard their assets against hijacking by other crooks. But one of the world’s largest and most sophisticated botnets is openly renting its infected PCs to any and all comers, and has even created a Firefox add-on to assist customers.

ISP Privacy Proposal Draws Fire

April 7, 2010

A proposal to let Internet service providers conceal the contact information for their business customers is drawing fire from a number of experts in the security community, who say the change will make it harder to mitigate the threat from botnets and malicious software.