Tag Archives: Verified by Visa

Loopholes in Verified by Visa & SecureCode

December 2, 2011

Trend Micro’s Rik Ferguson posted a good piece on Thursday about a major shortcoming in credit card security programs maintained by MasterCard and Visa. Although the loophole that Ferguson highlighted may be unsettling to some, fraudsters who specialize in stealing and using stolen credit cards online have been exploiting it for years.

Big Scores and Hi-Scores

March 23, 2011

Business gurus have long maintained that time = $, but that doesn’t mean playtime necessarily detracts from the bottom line. As many corporations have discovered, employees tend to be more productive when they have time to give their brains a break, and gameplay is the perfect escape. So it’s not surprising that some cyber criminals have taken this lesson to heart, and are crafting crime machines to include games that allow them to steal money and set hi-scores at the same time.

Captchabot: Blurring Human and Machine

November 16, 2010

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.