Blog posts with "cyber fraud"

A new and devious spin on an old con was recently uncovered by Israeli security firm Trusteer, makers of the Rapport financial anti-malware package. The con involves using a Trojan horse (such as SpyEye, Zeus, or Carberp) to take control of the victim’s computer in order to discover financial information and login credentials. This basic maneuver has been used for years by hackers to steal money from victims’ accounts, but this new tactic substantially delays the discovery of the fraud, ...

  "Preemptive counterattack" is taking on a whole new meaning. Though the US military has long maintained a policy of securing its networks and reserving a right to attack those who attack its networks, the issues of going on the offensive is now being discussed. This is not a new issue, but it has come to light recently due to increasing attacks on US networks and changes in the legal and political spheres. Critics are already pointing to the fact that these types of attacks often cause uni...

In an interesting New York Times article, the author examines the basic functions of Russian cyber criminal networks and why they often go unpunished. Here are a few quotes:  Law enforcement groups in Russia have been reluctant to pursue these talented authors of Internet fraud, for reasons, security experts say, of incompetence, corruption or national pride. Underscoring the nationalistic tone of much of Russian computer crime, one site [hacker site that exchanged credit card numbers to ai...

In a great article by Ben Bain at GCN, he stresses the need for an improved educational system to better prepare students for future cyber-security threats. Here is the article: "Strengthening education in science, technology, engineering and math is crucial to U.S. cybersecurity efforts, a senior Homeland Security Department official said today. Richard Marshall, director of global cybersecurity management in the Homeland Security Department’s National Cybersecurity Division, said improvi...

In an interesting development to the Mariposa Botnet take-down I reported earlier on, a large batch of cell-phones were apparently shipped by Vodafone containing the trojan powering the Mariposa Botnet. Here is the story from the Register: "Vodafone Spain has accepted that 3,000 customers were potentially exposed to malware after Mariposa botnet agents strayed onto the HTC Magic smartphone. The admission to Spanish media on Thursday follows a meeting between the mobile phone giant's Iberian...

A new class of hackers has emerged: the Ponzi Hacker. Well maybe hackers perpetrating frauds isn't new, but assisting a billionaire to fool the Securities and Exchange Commission through clever coding as part of a much larger ponzi scheme is, well, novel. Yes, you guessed it, we're talking about good old Bernie Madoff. Here is a quote from the Register: "A federal grand jury has indicted two computer programmers on fraud and conspiracy charges for developing programs used by Bernard Madoff ...

  According to the Internet Crime Complaint Center's (iC3) 2009 Internet Crime Report, Washington D.C. is the Cybercrime capital of the U.S. with 116 cyber-criminals per 100,000. Here is an excerpt from a news story from WTOP summarizing the findings: "IC3, a joint effort of the National White Collar Crime Center and FBI, says Nevada and Washington hold the No. 2 and No. 3 spots.  Cyber-crimes are so common victims often neglect to report them. But the number of complaints to IC3 jumped mo...

  Just ran across this story about criminals replacing the credit card key pads at the cash registers at some Hancock Fabrics stores with fraudulent ones that stole pin numbers and other personal details of users. Here are some quotes from the Register:  "Crooks planted bogus payment card processing terminals at multiple locations operated by the Hancock Fabrics chain store that allowed for the theft of sensitive financial data from customers, the company warned. The personal identificatio...

  Spanish authorities, with the help of private cyber security companies, have identified and arrested three individuals, whose online names are "jonyloleante," aged 30, "netkairo," 31, and "ostiator," 25. The three were identified as the ring-leaders of a massive botnet know as "mariposa." The network was started in 2008 and infected nearly 13 million computers. Over half the Fortune 1000 companies were infiltrated by the botnet, including over 40 major banks. The botnet was present in near...

At the recent conference Combating Cybercrime in Betting and Gaming 2010, a number of interesting topics were covered. Of particular interest to the author of this blog was the coverage of terrorist utilization of the internet for fundraising and money laundering. In an example of cyberterrorism, online gambling sites were used by three men, who were also accused of inciting terror, to launder millions of dollars that had been stolen through online check fraud and identity theft schemes. Appa...