McAfee just published the sixth edition of its Security Journal, which includes a lengthy piece I wrote about the pros and cons of taking down Internet service providers and botnets that facilitate cyber criminal activity. The analysis focuses on several historical examples of what I call “shuns” and “stuns,” or taking out rogue networks either by ostracizing them, or by kneecapping their infrastructure in a coordinated surprise attack, respectively.
Operating and planting an ATM skimmer — cleverly disguised technology that thieves attach to cash machines to intercept credit and debit card data — can be a risky venture, because the crooks have to return to the scene of the crime to retrieve their skimmers along with the purloined data. Increasingly, however, criminals are using ATM skimmers that eliminate much of that risk by relaying the information via text message.
Most Internet users know to avoid the telltale signs of phish bait: An e-mail that asks you to click on a link and enter your e-mail or banking credentials at the resulting Web site. But a new phishing concept that exploits user inattention and trust in browser tabs may fool even the most wary Web surfers.
Visa on Friday warned banks that it has received reliable intelligence that an organized criminal group plans to attempt to move large amounts of fraudulent payments through a merchant account in Eastern Europe over the weekend.
McAfee’s anti-virus software is erroneously detecting legitimate Windows system files as malicious, causing reboot loops and serious stability problems for many Windows XP users, according to multiple reports.
The owner and curator of bobbear.co.uk, a site that serves as one of the Internet’s most active and thorough index of fraud-related Web sites, announced Saturday that will he will be shuttering the site at the end of April.
A rash of home foreclosures and abandoned dwellings had already taken its toll on the tax revenue for the Village of Summit, a town of 10,000 just outside Chicago. Then, in March, computer crooks broke into the town’s online bank account, making off with nearly $100,000.
One bit of criticism I’ve heard about my stories on small businesses losing their shirts over online banking fraud is that I don’t often enough point out what banks and customers should be doing differently to lessen the chance of suffering one of these incidents. As it happens, a source of mine was recently at a conference where one of the key speakers was a senior official from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, one of the main banking industry regulators.
An Arkansas public water utility and a New Jersey town are the latest victims of an organized cyber crime gang that is stealing tens of millions of dollars from small to mid-sized organizations via online bank theft. On Thursday, officials… Read More »
I asked or simply polled some of the most vigilant sources of this information for their recent data, and put together a rough chart indicating the Top Ten most prevalent ISPs from each of their vantage points. ISPs or hosts that show up more than others on these various lists are color-coded to illustrate consistency of findings (click the image to enlarge it). The trouble is, all of these individual efforts map badness from just one or a handful of perspectives, each of which may be limited in some way by particular biases, such as the type of threats that they monitor. For example, some measure only phishing attacks, while others concentrate on charting networks that play host to malicious software and botnet controllers.
