Much digital ink has been spilled in this blog detailing the activities of so-called “money mules,” willing or unwitting individuals here in the United States who are lured into laundering money for international organized cyber crime gangs. The subject almost always generates fierce debate among readers about whether these mules should be prosecuted, and the debate usually hinges on whether the mules knew that they were contributing to a crime.
Aaron Jacobson of Authentify put together this map of all 43 of the U.S. commercial e-banking victims I’ve mentioned in stories at Krebsonsecurity.com and at the Washington Post’s Security Fix blog. Clicking on this Google Maps link brings up an… Read More »
Malicious hackers spend quite a bit of energy and time gaming the Internet search engines in a bid to have their malware-laden sites turn up on the first page of search results for hot, trending news topics. Increasingly, though, computer criminals are taking steps to keep search bots at bay, particularly with legitimate Web sites that have been hacked and booby-trapped with hostile code.
A call service that catered to bank and identity thieves has been busted up by U.S. and international authorities. The takedown provides a fascinating glimpse into a bustling and relatively crowded niche of fraud services in the criminal hacker underground.… Read More »
Internet hosting provider Network Solutions is once again trying to limit the damage from a hacking incident that has left a large number of customer Web sites serving up malicious code.
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.
Not long ago, there were only a handful of serious so-called “exploit packs,” crimeware packages that make it easy for hackers to booby-trap Web sites with code that installs malicious software. These days, however, it seems like we’re hearing about a new custom exploit kit every week. Part of the reason for this may be that more enterprising hackers are seeing the moneymaking potential of these offerings, which range from a few hundred dollars per kit to upwards of $10,000 per installation — depending on the features and plugins requested.
Oracle Corp. has shipped a new version of its Java software that nixes a feature in Java that hackers have been using to foist malicious software. Java 6 Update 20 was released sometime in the last 24 hours, and includes some security fixes, although Oracle’s documentation on that front is somewhat opaque. Most significantly, the update removes a feature that hackers have started using to install malware.
Last week, a Google security researcher detailed a little-known feature built into Java that can be used to launch third-party applications. Today, security experts unearthed evidence that a popular song lyrics Web site was compromised and seeded with code that leverages this Java feature to install malicious software.
Security experts have long maintained that running two different anti-virus products on the same Windows machine is asking for trouble, because the two programs will compete for resources, slow down or even crash the host PC.
But an upstart anti-virus company called Immunet Protect is hoping Windows users shrug off this conventional wisdom, and embrace the dual anti-virus approach. Indeed, the company’s free product works largely by sharing data about virus detections by other anti-virus products on the PCs of the Immunet user community.
