Microsoft, Amazon Take Phishers to Court
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Microsoft and Amazon.com have joined forces against perpetrators of phishing scams, filing a lawsuit against a Canadian company that they say ran a spamming campaign using Microsoft&#39;s Hotmail services and forging Amazon&#39;s name.
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Microsoft, the world&#39;s biggest software company, is launching a string of court actions in the United States and Europe against cybersquatters, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday.
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In a lawsuit, the commission alleges that two companies engaged in unfair acts and practices with their marketing and software.
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IT industry leaders Amazon.com and Microsoft said Tuesday that they have joined forces to file several lawsuits targeting individuals accused of carrying out Internet crimes such as spamming, phishing and e-mail address spoofing.
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The US Federal Trade Commission last week sued an outfit that it says is using spyware to bombard computer users with pop-up ads in order to promote anti-spyware products called Spy Wiper or Spy Deleter.
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The US Federal Trade Commission filed a legal complaint last week against two companies that are believed to have infected computers with spyware and pop-up advertising and then attempted to sell their ownersâ anti-spyware software.
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BTG, a London-based firm that focuses on intellectual property and technology commercialization, filed suit against Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com and two other Internet companies for infringing on patents related to the tracking of users online.
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Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. filed one joint and several separate lawsuits on Monday against companies and individuals accusing them variously of trying to defraud
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Amazon.com and Microsoft Corp., the twin peaks of the Seattle area&#39;s technology community, are joining forces to attack the tide of spam and fraudulent e-mail messages that clog in-boxes
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Apparently it&#39;s not just unwary individuals that fall victim to online scammers. Even large corporations, it seems, can get suckered into parting with their money by devious&#160;phishers.Case in point: Eden Prairie, MN.-based grocery chain Supervalu, which earlier this year got conned into depositing more than $10 million into two fraudulent bank accounts before recognizing the ruse. Details of the case are contained in court documents filed in connection with two forfeiture cases stemming from the incident.According to federal court filings in the U.S. District Court for the District of Idaho, the fraudulent activity took place in late February and early March this year. In the court filings, Stephen Kilgroff, Supervalu&#39;s vice president of legal affairs, said that on February 26 and 28 the company received two separate e-mails, one purporting to be from an employee at American Greetings Corp. and the second from an employee at Frito-Lay, both company-approved vendors.Both e-mails told Supervalu to send future payments for each vendor to new bank account numbers. In the case of the e-mail that purported to be from American Greetings Corp., Supervalu was advised to send payments to an HSBC account in Miami. The other e-mail advised Supervalu to send Frito-Lay payments to an account at First Security Bank in Rogers, Arkansas.Between Feb 28 and March 3, Supervalu deposited just over $6.5 million via multiple wire-transfers to the HSBC account, thinking that it was sending the money to American Greetings Corp. Similarly, on March 2 it made eight separate wire-transfers to the bank in Arkansas, depositing a total of $3.6 million to an account it thought belonged to Frito-Lay.In addition to the $6.5 million deposited by Supervalu into the HSBC account, an additional amount of $500,000 had been deposited into the same account by a second company, identified as &quot;ROHM&quot; on court documents. No information has been available concerning the second company, and it is not a party to subsequent litigation.Around March 6, according to the filings made by Kilgroff, Supervalu discovered that it had been &quot;induced&quot; into making the transfers to the bogus accounts. Following the discovery of the fraud, Supervalu quickly notified the appropriate law enforcement authorities, who managed to recover nearly all of the money before it could be withdrawn from the accounts.The recovered money is now being claimed by Frito-Lay, American Greetings and Supervalu. In making the claim to the recovered money, Frito-Lay said that it believes the money belongs to Supervalu and said supported that company&#39;s claim to ownership of the misdirected funds.&quot;However to the extent there is any determination that the ownership of these funds changed from Albertsons/Supervalu [the Albertsons grocery chain was recently acquired by Supervalu] to Frito-Lay (as a result of the attempted transfer, the misdirection, or any other development) Frito-Lay makes this claim to these funds in the alternative and subject to any claim of ownership by Albertsons/Supervalu&quot; the company said in an affidavit.A federal judge is expected to rule sometime in November on which firm should receive the recovered funds.A spokeswoman from Supervalu responded via e-mail to a request for comment. &quot;As indicated by the forfeiture complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney&#39;s Office in Boise, Supervalu was the target of attempted financial fraud,&quot; spokeswoman Haley Meyer said. &quot;Due to our internal controls and processes, we were able to quickly discover and report this to the FBI. As a result of the quick work of the Boise FBI Office and the U.S. Attorney, any funds lost are minimal.&quot;Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.&#160;
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In a strongly worded rebuttal, Amazon.com on Thursday countersued IBM. The companies have charged each other with patent infringement.
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Amazon.com and Microsoft Tuesday announced that they had joined forces to put spammers and phishing scammers in new legal crosshairs.
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(InfoWorld) - MicrosoftÂ is using data-mining techniques from a third party in its Internet browsers toÂ guard against "phishing"Â attacks, where dubious Web sites try to harvest personal information from unknowing victims. Digital Resolve, of Norcross, Georgia, announced Tuesday that Microsoft is licensing data that comes from its Trusted Server technology, which crawls the Internet and builds lists of Web sites and their legitimate IP (Internet Protocol) addresses. The data will beÂ used by the antiphishing filterÂ in Microsoft's Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7 in addition to Windows Live Toolbar, a browser search box, Digital Resolve said. The technology focuses heavily on the Web sites of financial companies and e-commerce sites. It looks at 39 characteristics of a Web site, including IP address, location, domain and the Internet Service Provider, said Dennis Maicon, Digital Resolve's vice president for financial services solutions. It also checks how long a particular domain is valid based on its registration information. "When somebody goes to type in Barclays.com, it's able to then take that URL, resolve it to an IP address, and then check against a list to see if it is an authorized Barclays server," Maicon said. The company says its technology takes the opposite approach of so-called "blacklists," which are lists of reported phishing sites, said Susan Daw, Digital Resolve's director of marketing. Keeping updated blacklists can be difficult as phishing sites may only be active for a short time, Daw said. Rather than comparing a URL (uniform resource locator) to a list of bad sites, Digital Resolve's technology lets the phishing filter know which sites are good, Daw said. Microsoft is using a combination of technologies for the phishing filter, including blacklists. Daw said the technology is 100 percent successful for Web sites it has indexed. However, it's the first time the technology has been deployed, she said. For suspicious Web sites, such as a bank site with an irregular URL, the phishing filter triggers a warning to the user to either continue viewing the site or close the Web page. Digital Resolve said the technology can guard against "man-in-the-middle" style attacks, where an attacker collects a victim's login and password before passing the person to the legitimate site. Those attacks are often mounted from an irregular IP address that can be checked, according to Digital Resolve. Â ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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Redmond-based Microsoft Corp. filed three lawsuits against alleged spammers in US District Court in Seattle Oct. 27, claiming the defendants &quot;spoofed&quot; its Web site, as well as the Web domains of America Online, EarthLink Inc.
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The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has filed a legal complaint against two companies that allegedly infected computers with spyware and pop-up advertising, then tried to sell spyware-blocking software.
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As millions of computer users try to deal with the scourge of adware and other nefarious online marketing programs, two purveyors of the technology are battling in a Seattle court.
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Hacking tools that let you unlawfully activate trial software can include malware used by hackers to steal financial data.