Online Fraud and Theft Under Attack With Keystroke Recognition
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HEEMSKERK, North Holland, March 10  /PRNewswire/ -- ID Control BV, the specialist in advanced online identity and access management today announced to fight online identity theft and fraud with user's unique and characteristic typing behavior pattern recognition.
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Phishing "toolkits" and underground Internet chat rooms are making the economics of online fraud so much in favor of criminals that a continued increase in phishing activity is all but certain. -washingtonpost.com
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(InfoWorld) - Stolen bank account numbers are commanding the highest price in an underground trade of personal details stolen by hackers, according to a survey released Monday by security vendor Symantec. Bank account details command prices of up to $400, while credit card details sell for between $0.50 and $5, e-mail passwords from $1 to $350 each, and e-mail addresses from $2 to $4 per megabyte, according to Symantec's Internet Security Threat Report, which covers the first half of the year. The online trade in stolen details highlights the commercialization ofÂ Internet crime, with gangs researching, developing and marketing nefarious software for other criminals, said William Beer, director of security practice for Europe. There has been an increase in the quality and quantity of malicious code sold on the Internet, driven by well-funded international groups of criminals, Beer said. The hackers are obtaining the information through increasingly targeted attacks on computers that often involve collecting personal information about a person from social networks such as MySpace or Facebook, Beer said. With specific personal details, the hacker can construct a personalized e-mail that entices the victim to either click on an attachment containing malicious software or visit a phishing site. Symantec is also seeing multistage attacks where the attacker places a small piece of software on a target computer that then acts as a beachhead for downloading other software. "The end user will not even notice the attacks have taken place because it's a very gradual process," Beer said. On the spam front, Symantec said it has noticed a 30 percent drop in so-called "pump-and-dump" spam, where e-mails touting penny stocks are sent out, causing a rise in the stock price before the perpetrators sell the stock early. The decline can be attributed to aÂ crackdown by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Also down is the percentage of spam with images, which started as a highly effective way to bypass spam filters but is now less so. About 27 percent of the spam analyzed by Symantec between April and May contained images, down from 50 percent the first week in January, Symantec said. The decrease is due to an improvement in spam filters as well as the decline in pump-and-dump spam, which often used images, the company said.
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Tool that identifies sites pretending to be connected to banks, eBay and more could help leave "phishing" scammers dead in the water.
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A few simple keystrokes may soon turn blather into books.
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Much of the trouble centered on phishing, a type of attack where fake Web pages are constructed to harvest log-in details, credit card numbers or other personal information. And, oh yes, spam is back.
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Online criminals are getting better at targeting people's sensibility to hack into their computers.
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Multifactor authentication is all the rage these days, thanks to increasingly sophisticated trojans and phishing attacks and even rootkits aimed at stealing passwords and sensitive data. High-stakes online crime has even spurred financial services companies and some enterprises to consider new, "risk-based authentication" solutions, which examine behavioral patterns and session characteristics to identify rogue users.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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A computer security researcher figures out exactly how a high-tech scammer
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In a twist, security researchers have discovered a group of hackers who are exploiting a new category of victims -- aspiring Internet scammers.A Moroccan group called &quot;Mr. Brain&quot; is offering free phishing kits on a Web site hosted in France, said Paul Mutton, Internet services developer at Netcraft, a security company in Bath, England.The software packages make it easy to quickly set up a fraudulent Web site mimicking a known brand in order to trick people into divulging credit card details or bank account numbers. Templates for spam e-mail are also included, targeting brands such as Bank of America, eBay, PayPal, and HSBC.Mr. Brain&#39;s Web site lists the kits and what kind of details each one is capable of collecting, such as usernames, passwords or Social Security numbers. Netcraft posted screenshots on its Web site.But what the aspiring scammer doesn&#39;t know is that the phishing kits are designed to send any sensitive information that&#39;s collected back to e-mail accounts controlled by Mr. Brain, Mutton said.&quot;Obviously, that&#39;s why they are offering this stuff for free,&quot; Mutton said. &quot;I was impressed by it.&quot;Mr. Brain hides the special e-mail function in a blend of PHP scripts, one of which is encrypted, Mutton said. Just in case someone decrypts it, Mr. Brain has written at the top of the file &quot;Don&#39;t need to change anything here. Created by Mr. Brain Morocco Team.&quot;The scheme seems to be targeted at new phishers, Mutton said. Mr. Brain benefits since other wannabe scammers shoulder the cost and risk of finding an ISP (Internet Service Provider) to host the phishing site, Mutton said.&quot;Essentially, they&#39;re exploiting all these novice phishers -- basically getting them to do all the hard work,&quot; Mutton said.It&#39;s difficult to tell without further research how many of the free phishing kits linked with this latest scam are live on the Internet, but Mutton said Netcraft noticed one earlier this month targeting Bank of America.&quot;Clearly, these are actively being used in phishing attacks,&quot; Mutton said.
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A new attack against implementations of the popular RSA encryption scheme demonstrates how hard it is to protect information when someone else has control of the computer on which it resides.  Commentary by Bruce Schneier.
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User-generated Web content is becoming a target for hackers and cross-site scripting attacks on Web sites can lead to malware taking over the browsers of machines that use the sites.
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MIT researchers develop an authentication system that's not so easily revealed to prying eyes.
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Handling of images could allow an attacker to take over your PC.
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Fraudsters have developed phishing emails capable of automatically stealing bank log-in details without requiring users to click on a website link, email filtering firm MessageLabs warns.
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Internet "phishing" scams are  becoming more difficult to detect as criminals develop new ways  to trick consumers into revealing passwords, bank account  numbers and other sensitive information, security experts say.
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By Anonymous  WAN lessons learned  Plus: How to hide your online footprints.