A Russian spammer suspected of being the man behind the infamous Rustock spam botnet earned millions of dollars blasting junk email for counterfeit Internet pharmacies. Those ill-gotten riches allowed him to buy flashy sports cars, but new information suggests they also attracted the attention of common street thugs who targeted and ultimately mugged the spammer, stealing two of his prized rides.
Earlier this year, Russian police arrested Dmitry Stupin, a man known in hacker circles as “SaintD.” Stupin was long rumored to be the right-hand man of Igor Gusev, the alleged proprietor of GlavMed and SpamIt, two shadowy sister organizations that until this time last year were the largest sources of spam touting rogue Internet pharmacies.
According to several sources who are familiar with the matter, Russian police pulled Stupin off of a plane before it left Moscow. The police also reportedly took Stupin’s MacBook and copied its contents. The police detained Stupin as part of an investigation into Gusev launched nearly a year ago. Gusev fled his native Moscow last year and has not returned.
Sometime in the past few days, more than four years’ worth of chat conversations — apparently between Stupin, Gusev and dozens of other GlavMed employees — were leaked. Those conversations offer a fascinating glimpse into the day-to-day operations one of the world’s largest organization cyber criminal organizations.
You’re out and about, and your smartphone’s battery is about to die. Maybe you’re at an airport, hotel, or shopping mall. You don’t have the power cable needed to charge the device, but you do have a USB cord that can supply the needed juice. Then you spot an oasis: A free charging kiosk. Do you hesitate before connecting your phone to this unknown device that could be configured to read most of the data on your phone, and perhaps even upload malware?
Cyber thieves stole $217,000 last month from the Metropolitan Entertainment & Convention Authority (MECA), a nonprofit organization responsible for operating the Qwest Center and other gathering places in Omaha, Nebraska.
I recently wrote about an online service that was selling access to stolen credit and debit card data. That post received a lot of attention, but criminal bazaars are a dime a dozen. The real news is that few of these fraud shops are secure enough to keep their stock of stolen data from being pilfered by thieves.
Adobe has shipped patches to fix a slew of critical security flaws in its products, including Flash, Shockwave Player and Adobe AIR.
Microsoft today released 13 software updates to fix at least 22 security flaws in its Windows operating system and other software. Two of the flaws addressed in the August patch batch earned Microsoft’s most dire “critical” rating, meaning that attackers can exploit them to break into systems without any help from users.
A district court judge in Maine last week approved a pending decision that commercial banks which protect accounts with little more than passwords and secret questions are in compliance with federal online banking security guidelines.
Six million Web pages have been booby-trapped with malware, using security vulnerabilities in software that hundreds of thousands of e-commerce Web sites use to process credit and debit card transactions. Web security firm Armorize said it has detected more than… Read More »
On Wednesday I wrote that many of the top fake antivirus distribution programs had ceased operations, citing difficulty in processing credit card transactions from victims. Others are starting to take note of the trend: Security firm McAfee says it has witnessed a dramatic drop in the number of customers reporting scareware detections in recent weeks.
