Data: Nearly All U.S. Home Depot Stores Hit
New data gathered from the cybercrime underground suggests that the apparent credit and debit card breach at Home Depot involves nearly all of the company’s stores across the nation.
Tag Archives: International Computer Science Institute
Service Drains Competitors’ Online Ad Budget
The longer one lurks in the Internet underground, the more difficult it becomes to ignore the harsh reality that for nearly every legitimate online business there is a cybercrime-oriented anti-business. Case in point: Today’s post looks at a popular service that helps crooked online marketers exhaust the Google AdWords budgets of their competitors.
No Bail for Alleged Silk Road Mastermind
A federal judge has denied bail for Ross Ulbricht, the ? man arrested last month on suspicion of running the Silk Road, an online black market that offered everything from drugs and guns to computer hackers and hitmen for hire.
The decision came after federal prosecutors dumped a virtual truckload of additional incriminating evidence supporting its claim that Ulbricht was the infamous Silk Road administrator known as the “Dread Pirate Roberts” (DPR), and that he was indeed a strong flight risk. To top it off, the government also now alleges that Ulbricht orchestrated and paid for a murder-for-hire scheme targeting six individuals (until today, Ulbricht was accused of plotting just two of these executions).
Feds Arrest Alleged Top Silk Road Drug Seller
Federal authorities last week arrested a Washington state man accused of being one of the most active and sought-after drug dealers on the online black market known as the “Silk Road.” Meanwhile, new details about the recent coordinated takedown of the Silk Road became public, as other former buyers and sellers on the fraud bazaar pondered who might be next and whether competing online drug markets will fill the void.
Feds Take Down Online Fraud Bazaar ‘Silk Road’, Arrest Alleged Mastermind
Prosecutors in New York today said today that federal agencies have taken over the Silk Road, a sprawling underground Web site that has earned infamy as the “eBay of drugs.” On Tuesday, federal agents in San Francisco arrested the Silk Road’s alleged mastermind. Prosecutors say 29-year-old Ross William Ulbricht, a.k.a “Dread Pirate Roberts” (DPR), will be charged with a range of criminal violations, including conspiracy to commit drug trafficking, and money laundering.
Buying Battles in the War on Twitter Spam
The success of social networking community Twitter has given rise to an entire shadow economy that peddles dummy Twitter accounts by the thousands, primarily to spammers, scammers and malware purveyors. But new research on identifying bogus accounts has helped Twitter to drastically deplete the stockpile of existing accounts for sale, and holds the promise of driving up costs for both vendors of these shady services and their customers.
Rogue Pharma, Fake AV Vendors Feel Credit Card Crunch
New research suggests that companies behind some of America’s best known consumer brands may be far more effective at fighting cybercrime than any efforts to enact more stringent computer security and anti-piracy laws.
Recent legislative proposals in the United States — such as the Stop Online Piracy Act — have sought to combat online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods by granting Internet service providers and authorities broader powers to prosecute offenders, and by imposing stronger criminal penalties for such activity. But recent data collected by academic researchers suggests that brand holders already have the tools to quash much of this activity.
PharmaLeaks: Rogue Pharmacy Economics 101
Consumer demand for cheap prescription drugs sold through spam-advertised Web sites shows no sign of abating, according to a new analysis of bookeeping records maintained by three of the world’s largest rogue pharmacy operations.
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, the International Computer Science Institute and George Mason University examined caches of data showing the day-to-day finances of GlavMed, SpamIt, and Rx-Promotion, shadowy affiliate programs that over a four-year period processed more than $170 million worth of orders from customers seeking cheaper, more accessible and more discretely available drugs. The result is is perhaps the most detailed analysis yet of the business case for the malicious software and spam epidemics that persist to this day.
