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    • Posts Tagged: western union

    A Little Sunshine / Other — 14 Comments
    13
    Dec 11

    Bugs Money

    Talk about geek chic. Facebook has started paying researchers who find and report security bugs by issuing them custom branded “White Hat” debit cards that can be reloaded with funds each time the researchers discover new flaws.

    Facebook's Bug Bounty debit card for security researchers who report security flaws in its site and applications.

    I first read about this card on the Polish IT security portal Niebezpiecznik.pl, which recently published an image of a bug bounty card given to Szymon Gruszecki, a Polish security researcher and penetration tester. A sucker for most things credit/debit card related, I wanted to hear more from researchers who’d received the cards.

    Like many participants in Facebook’s program, Gruszecki also is hunting bugs for other companies that offer researchers money in exchange for privately reporting vulnerabilities, including Google, Mozilla, CCBill and Piwik. That’s not to say he only finds bugs for money.

    “I regularly report Web app vulnerabilities to various companies [that don't offer bounties], including Microsoft, Apple, etc.,” Gruszecki wrote in an email exchange.

    The bug bounty programs are a clever way for Internet-based companies to simultaneously generate goodwill within the security community and to convince researchers to report bugs privately. Researchers are rewarded if their bugs can be confirmed, and if they give the affected companies time to fix the flaws before going public with the information.

    As an added bonus, some researchers — like Gruszecki — choose not to disclose the bugs at all.

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    Other — 10 Comments
    15
    Jul 11

    More Than 100 Arrested in Fake Internet Sales

    Law enforcement officials in Romania and the United States have arrested and charged more than 100 individuals in connection with an organized fraud ring that used phony online auctions for cars, boats and other high-priced items to bilk consumers out of at least $10 million.

    According to a statement from the Justice Department, the scams run by this ring followed a familiar script. Conspirators located in Romania would post items for sale such as cars, motorcycles and boats on Internet auction and online websites. They would instruct interested buyers to wire transfer the purchase money to a fictitious name they claimed to be an employee of an escrow company. Once the victim wired the funds, the co-conspirators in Romania would text information about the wire transfer to co-conspirators in the United States known as “arrows” to enable them to retrieve the wired funds. They would also provide the arrows with instructions as to where to send the funds after retrieval.

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    A Little Sunshine / Target: Small Businesses / The Coming Storm — 28 Comments
    22
    Jan 10

    Cyber Crooks Cooked the Books at Fla. Library

    Jan. 7, 2010 was a typical sunny Thursday morning at the Delray Beach Public Library in coastal Florida, aside from one, ominous dark cloud on the horizon: It was the first time in as long as anyone could remember that the books simply weren’t checking out.

    Sure, patrons were still able to borrow tomes in the usual way — by presenting their library cards. The trouble was, none of the staff could figure out how or why nearly $160,000 had disappeared from their bank ledgers virtually overnight. The money was sent in sub-$10,000 chunks to some 16 new employees that had been added to the usual outgoing direct deposit payroll.

    One of those phantom employees was 19-year-old Brittany Carmine, 900 miles to the north in Richmond, Va. Carmine had just  lost her job at a local marketing firm when she received a work-at-home job offer from a company calling itself the Prestige Group. She said after researching the company online, she decided it was legitimate, and filled out the paperwork to begin her employment. Just days later, she received a bank deposit of $9,649, with instructions to wire all but roughly $770 of that to individuals in Ukraine.

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    Target: Small Businesses — 25 Comments
    13
    Jan 10

    Money Mules Helped to Rob W. Va. Bank

    I have written a great deal about how organized cyber gangs in Eastern Europe drained tens of millions of dollars from the bank accounts of small- to mid-sized businesses last year. But new evidence indicates one of the gangs chiefly responsible for these attacks managed to hack directly into a U.S. bank last year and siphon off tens of thousands of dollars.

    On July 30, 2009, at least five individuals across the United States each received an electronic transfer of funds for roughly $9,000, along with instructions to pull the cash out of their account and wire the funds in chunks of less than $3,000 via Western Union and Moneygram to three different individuals in Ukraine and Moldova.

    The recipients had all been hired through work-at-home job offers via popular job search Web sites, and were told they would be acting as agents for an international finance company. The recruits were told that their job was to help their employers expedite money transfers for international customers that were — for some overly complicated reason or another — not otherwise able to move payments overseas in a timely enough manner.

    The money was sent to these five U.S. recruits by an organized ring of computer thieves in Eastern Europe that specializes in hacking into business bank accounts. The attackers likely infiltrated the bank the same way they broke into the accounts of dozens of small businesses last year: By spamming out e-mails that spoofed a variety of trusted entities, from the IRS, to the Social Security Administration and UPS, urging recipients to download an attached password-stealing virus disguised as a tax form, benefits claim or a shipping label, for example. Recipients who opened the poisoned attachments infected their PCs, and the thieves struck gold whenever they managed to infect a PC belonging to someone with access to the company’s bank accounts online.

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