Blog posts with "identity theft"

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, ...

  In an Orlando Sentinel article by Susan Jacobson entitled Elderly who trusted high- living couple now face nightmares, former clients spoke out about Ross and Linda Littlefield, who were “charged with 10 counts of fraudulently using the Lentzes' credit cards, one count of fraudulently using their personal-identification information and one count of engaging in a scheme to defraud for at least $20,000 but less than $50,000.” Following are excerpts from the article: When her husband's Al...

On June 24, 2011, the law office of Campbell Law P.A. filed a lawsuit for civil damages in the Circuit Court of Osceola County, Florida against disbarred-attorney Linda Vasquez Littlefield based on allegations that she and her former husband, Ross Littlefield, operated a criminal enterprise that defrauded elderly clients out of their life savings. Campbell Law brought this suit on behalf of individuals suffering from Alzheimer’s and dementia, as well as their representatives, who claim the ...

  "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...

  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...

  According to recent research, anti-virus programs are not giving us full protection against hackers, such as the Chinese hackers who targeted Google recently. Take a look at this story from Prweb.com: "NSS Labs, Inc., the leading independent security testing organization, today announced the results of its evaluation of seven popular consumer endpoint security products in protecting the vulnerability exploited in the recent 'Operation Aurora' attack conducted against Google and at least 3...

  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...