From Ellen Messmer’s “Symantec takes cybercrime snapshot with ‘Underground Economy’ report” (Network World: 24 November 2008): The “Underground Economy” report [from Symantec] contains a snapshot of online criminal activity observed from July 2007 to June 2008 by a Symantec team monitoring activities in Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and Web-based forums where stolen goods are advertised. [...]
Posted on April 25th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Tom Espiner’s “Cracking open the cybercrime economy” (CNET News: 14 December 2007): “Over the years, the criminal elements, the ones who are making money, making millions out of all this online crime, are just getting stronger and stronger. I don’t think we are really winning this war.” As director of antivirus research for F-Secure, [...]
Posted on February 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Dan Goodin’s “Crimeware giants form botnet tag team” (The Register: 5 September 2008): The Rock Phish gang – one of the net’s most notorious phishing outfits – has teamed up with another criminal heavyweight called Asprox in overhauling its network with state-of-the-art technology, according to researchers from RSA. Over the past five months, Rock [...]
Posted on February 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Chapter 2: Botnets Overview of Craig A. Schiller’s Botnets: The Killer Web App (Syngress: 2007): Christopher Abad provides insight into the phishing economy in an article published online by FirstMonday.org (http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/ issue10_9/abad/). The article, “The economy of phishing: A survey of the operations of the phishing market,” reveals the final phase of the phishing [...]
Posted on November 22nd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Dennis Fisher’s “Storm, Nugache lead dangerous new botnet barrage” (SearchSecurity.com: 19 December 2007): [Dave Dittrich, a senior security engineer and researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle], one of the top botnet researchers in the world, has been tracking botnets for close to a decade and has seen it all. But this new [...]
Posted on November 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Federico Biancuzzi’s “Phishing with Rachna Dhamija” (SecurityFocus: 19 June 2006): We discovered that existing security cues are ineffective, for three reasons: 1. The indicators are ignored (23% of participants in our study did not look at the address bar, status bar, or any SSL indicators). 2. The indicators are misunderstood. For example, one regular [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Lee Gomes’s Phisher Tales: How Webs of Scammers Pull Off Internet Fraud (The Wall Street Journal: 20 June 2005): The typical phisher, he discovered, isn’t a movie-style villain but a Romanian teenager, albeit one who belongs to a social and economic infrastructure that is both remarkably sophisticated and utterly ragtag. If, in the early [...]
Posted on June 16th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From John Leyden’s DIY phishing kits hit the Net (The Register: 19 August 2004): Do-it-yourself phishing kits are being made available for download free of charge from the Internet, according to anti-virus firm Sophos. Anyone surfing the Web can now get their hands on these kits, launch their own phishing attack and potentially defraud computer [...]
Posted on June 14th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From David Kirkpatrick’s “The Net’s not-so-secret economy of crime” (Fortune: 15 May 2006): Raze Software offers a product called CC2Bank 1.3, available in freeware form – if you like it, please pay for it. … But CC2Bank’s purpose is the management of stolen credit cards. Release 1.3 enables you to type in any credit card [...]
Posted on June 4th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “Phishing“: Phishing, for those of you who have been away from the Internet for the past few years, is when an attacker sends you an e-mail falsely claiming to be a legitimate business in order to trick you into giving away your account info — passwords, mostly. When this is done by [...]
Posted on April 28th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Computerworld‘s “Florida banks hacked in new spoofing attack“: Three Florida banks have had their Web sites compromised by hackers in an attack that security experts are calling the first of its type. Earlier this month, attackers were able to hack servers run by the Internet service provider that hosted the three banks’ Web sites. [...]
Posted on April 4th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Slashdot’s “Pay-per-email and the ‘Market Myth’“: But I think there’s a bigger problem underlying all of this. It’s not about specific problems with GoodMail’s or AOL’s or Hotmail’s system. The problem is that many advocates of these systems say that any flaws will get sorted out automatically by “the market” — and in this [...]
Posted on April 4th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Reuters’ “Cybercrime yields more cash than drugs: expert“: Global cybercrime generated a higher turnover than drug trafficking in 2004 and is set to grow even further with the wider use of technology in developing countries, a top expert said on Monday. No country is immune from cybercrime, which includes corporate espionage, child pornography, stock [...]
Posted on November 29th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
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