Category Archives: The Coming Storm

This category includes blog posts about computer and Internet security threats now and on the horizon.

Help Kickstart a Film on Cybercrime

April 23, 2012
18 Comments

A deep sense of doubt and dread began to sink in halfway through our journey down a long, lonely desert highway from just outside Austin to coastal Texas. We were racing against the clock (we’d just scarfed down our third meal in a row at a roadside Subway shop), yet my minivan companions — a filmmaker from California and a husband-and-wife camera crew — seemed pleased with the footage we’d collected so far. I was far less sanguine about our prospects, and was almost certain that our carefully-laid plans to ambush a money mule on camera were about to unravel.

Thieves Replacing Money Mules With Prepaid Cards?

April 13, 2012
46 Comments

Recent ebanking heists — such as a $121,000 online robbery at a New York fuel supplier last month — suggest that cyber thieves increasingly are cashing out by sending victim funds to prepaid debit card accounts. The shift appears to be an effort to route around a major bottleneck for these crimes: Their dependency on unreliable money mules.

Mules traditionally have played a key role in helping thieves cash out hacked accounts and launder money. They are recruited through email-based work-at-home job scams, and are told they will be helping companies process payments. In a typical scheme, the mule provides her banking details to the recruiter, who eventually sends a fraudulent transfer and tells the mule to withdraw the funds in cash, keep a small percentage, and wire the remainder to co-conspirators abroad.

FBI: Smart Meter Hacks Likely to Spread

April 9, 2012
88 Comments

A series of hacks perpetrated against so-called “smart meter” installations over the past several years may have cost a single U.S. electric utility hundreds of millions of dollars annually, the FBI said in cyber intelligence bulletin obtained by KrebsOnSecurity. The law enforcement agency said this is the first known report of criminals compromising the hi-tech meters, and that it expects this type of fraud to spread across the country as more utilities deploy smart grid technology.

Smart meters are intended to improve efficiency, reliability, and allow the electric utility to charge different rates for electricity at different times of day. Smart grid technology also improves a utility’s ability to remotely read meters to determine electric usage.

Global Payments: 1.5MM Cards ‘Exported’

April 2, 2012
32 Comments

Global Payments, the credit and debit card processor that disclosed a breach of its systems late Friday, said in a statement late Sunday that the incident involved at least 1.5 million accounts. The news comes hours ahead of planned conference call with investors, and after Visa said it had pulled its seal of approval for the company.

In a press release issued 9:30 Sunday evening, Atlanta based Global Payments Inc. said it believes “the affected portion of its processing system is confined to North America and less than 1,500,000 card numbers may have been exported…Based on the forensic analysis to date, network monitoring and additional security measures, the company believes that this incident is contained. ”

Researchers Clobber Khelios Spam Botnet

March 28, 2012
11 Comments

Experts from across the security industry collaborated this week to quarantine more than 110,000 Microsoft Windows PCs that were infected with the Khelios worm, a contagion that forces infected PCs to blast out junk email advertising rogue Internet pharmacies.

Most botnets are relatively fragile: If security experts or law enforcement agencies seize the Internet servers used to control the zombie network, the crime machine eventually implodes. But Khelios (a.k.a. “Kelihos”) was built to withstand such attacks, employing a peer-to-peer structure not unlike that used by popular music and file-sharing sites to avoid takedown by the music and entertainment industry.

Twitter Bots Target Tibetan Protests

March 20, 2012
10 Comments

Twitter bots — automated accounts that auto-follow and send junk tweets hawking questionable wares and services — can be an annoyance to anyone who has even a modest number of followers. But increasingly, Twitter bots are being used as a tool to suppress political dissent, as evidenced by an ongoing flood of meaningless tweets directed at hashtags popular for tracking Tibetan protesters who are taking a stand against Chinese rule.

It’s not clear how long ago the bogus tweet campaigns began, but Tibetan sympathizers say they recently noticed that several Twitter hashtags related to the conflict — including #tibet and #freetibet — are now so constantly inundated with junk tweets from apparently automated Twitter accounts that the hashtags have ceased to become a useful way to track the conflict.

Half of All ‘Rogue’ Pharmacies at Two Registrars

March 12, 2012
25 Comments

Half of all “rogue” online pharmacies — sites that sell prescription drugs without requiring a prescription — got their Web site names from just two domain name registrars, a study released today found. The findings illustrate the challenges facing Internet policymakers in an industry that is largely self-regulated and rewards companies who market their services as safe havens for shadowy businesses.