News: US credit card firm fights DDoS attack
543140
US credit card processing firm Authorize.Net is fighting a sustained distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that has left it struggling to stay online.
201915
Antivirus firm Symantec is facing a denial-of-service attack on its Web site from the latest version of the MyDoom worm. Authors of MyDoom.
478583
Outages put a crimp in access at PayPal, Gawker. Also: Microsoft's latest security warnings.
59865
American Express is suing Visa and MasterCard plus eight US banks, claiming anti-competitive tactics kept it out of the market. The litigation is the latest setback for Visa and MasterCard, which last month
537479
The Estonian news site Delfi.ee weathers a two-week-long denial of service attack as uneasy political situation heats up again.
522625
Nasty squall New features of botnets created by the infamous Storm Worm allow denial of service attacks to be launched against security defenders that attempt to interrupt its operation.â¦
665687
D'oh Hackers might have gained access to the credit card details and personal information of up to 19,000 people after breaking into AT&amp;T's online store last weekend, the US telecoms giant said on Tuesday.â¦
333979
Credit-card transaction processing firm Authorize.Net has been hit by a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks that have caused temporary disruptions in service to some of its customers.
747772
(InfoWorld) - The e-card industry began seeing some pretty unfriendly greetings this past June. That's when scammers startedÂ flooding e-mail in-boxes with fake greeting cards, trying to trick victims into clicking on links that would send them to malicious Web sites. The goal is always the same: trick the victim into visiting an untrustworthy Web site, and then try to hijack his computer and make it part of a larger "botnet" network that can be pressed into service for a variety of nefarious purposes. Often the e-card messages are extremely simple -- something like "Our Greeting System has a Labor Day card for you, go here to pick it up." -- but scammers have sent hundreds of millions of them over the past few months. By July, SymantecÂ tracked more than 250 million fake cards, and soon the mainstream press had picked up on the story. On August 23, the Today Show ran a segment highlighting the problem, warning its viewers to be wary of the cards they open. All of that bad publicity has had at least a short-term effect on the public's willingness to use e-cards, according to Steve Ruschill general manager of Hallmark Interactive. "Overall we've probably seen a 10 percent decline in e-card sends," he said. "Within about a period of two weeks, especially when the Today Show story hit... we just saw it kind of drop." E-card use at Hallmark is starting to recover, and while the industry is now making some changes to respond to this problem, the fraud will probably not affect the e-card suppliers bottom line, said Barbara Miller, a spokeswoman with The Greeting Card Association. "I'm not sure that it's having that much impact other than the real need for the industry to make sure that consumers are aware of how to avoid e-mail fraud," she said. Certainly there has been customer confusion. During a three-week period around July, Miller found herself responding to more than 750 angry people who had received spam that purported to originate from her organization's Greetingcard.org domain. The Greeting Card Association is an industry organization that does not even send out e-cards, she noted. Now two of the largest e-card distributors in the U.S. have begun forcing e-card senders to include their first and last names in an effort to make it easier for recipients to tell when these cards are coming from someone they know. Late last week, AG.com's AmericanGreetings changed its e-cards to include the name and e-mail address of the sender in the body of the e-mail. "This basically just personalizes it so you know where the e-card is coming from, and so you know that it is a valid e-card," said Frank Cirillo, an AmericanGreetings spokesman. Cirillo said that, unlike Hallmark, AmericanGreetings has not seen a drop in e-card usage over the past few months. On Monday Hallmark followed suit and is now forcing users to enter their first and last names in order to make it clear to the recipient that the card is really coming from a known sender. Originally, Hallmark had intended to take things a step further, and eliminate links in its e-cards altogether. In tests, Hallmark sent redesigned cards to recipients, telling them not to click on links, but to instead type in the Hallmark.com Web address and then enter a special code to retrieve their messages. Ultimately, this didn't work out, however, after it confused some users, Ruschill said. That's because Web-based e-mail clients like Gmail and Yahoo Mail recognize Web addresses and automatically insert clickable links when they see things like Hallmark.com in a message. "We had a totally manual process laid out," he said. "I appreciate what Google and Yahoo have done but on the other side, it was like, 'man it's really confusing.'" The pain felt over the past few months by the greeting card industry shows how quickly scammers can undermine confidence in what has become a crucial communication tool for many industries. Because this kind of malicious spam is usually sent from the compromised botnet computers themselves it costs almost nothing to distribute. But it can take a toll on the reputation, and ultimately the revenues of companies that are targeted. "Companies have become more and more reliant upon the Internet and their Internet presence as a way to promote themselves and increase their revenues," said Dave Greenwood, vice president of technical operations with BD-Protect, a company that works with corporations, ISPs and law enforcement to take down servers that are being used in fraud. "They see the Internet and their online presence as a very important part of their revenue stream and they do not want to see that revenue stream put at risk." Â
226902
How bad is the Monster.com data breach? Bad enough. Did the crooks get their hooks in deep? Remarkably deep. Gregg Keizer has the details on what has gone wrong so far in the Infostealer.Monstres attack.
561467
WorldPay, the Royal Bank of Scotland's internet payment transaction outfit, is continuing to fight a sustained internet attack which has left its services largely unavailable for a third successive day.
152194
Bots operators face jailtime too Denial of service attacks (DDOS), where targets are deluged with requests for information, will be made a criminal offence in Sweden from 1 June.â¦
635804
(InfoWorld) - Enterprise companies will soon begin offloading many of their network security responsibilities to telecommunications and Internet service providers and save vast amounts of time and money doing so, if AT&T has its way. Speaking to the assembled crowd at the IDC Security Forum in New York on Wednesday, Edward Amoroso, chief security officer for AT&T's services division, predicted that enterprises will begin adopting more "virtual" security capabilities from their ISPs and bandwidth providers in the coming years as those companies are better positioned to do battle with botnets, spam, and denial-of-service )DoS) threats. Based on the bandwidth-providers' existing abilities to see spikes in traffic that are tell-tale signs of botnet, spam, or other malware activity -- long before enterprises can see evidence of the attacks on their own -- Amoroso contends that companies will soon concede the process of fighting the threats and turn to companies such as AT&T for help. "We think that security at the perimeter should be virtual, which is a somewhat controversial concept, because a lot of time, effort, and career capital has already been spent securing the perimeter," Amoroso said. "But we think a lot of existing technologies there are running out of legs, and simply running firewalls at the gateway is no longer a valuable proposition." The United States government's Telecommunications act of 1996 prevents carriers from approaching customers and marketing services to them based on any trends they observe on the end users' network connections. However, the companies can already identify much of the spam and malware activity being carried out in the pipe, based on their massive infrastructure, and should be enlisted to help solve security issues, he said. For threats such as distributed DoS that can easily be thwarted upstream, the CIO said, it makes little sense for companies to continue to invest in new technologies and staff when the carriers could easily detect and snuff out the campaigns ahead of time. "How do you stop DDoS at the edge? The physics just don't make sense. When these attacks happen, the customers' routers will already be dead," said Amoroso. "We think the idea that the pipe should be dumb is strange; with spam accounting for 90 percent of all traffic on the e-mail pipe, we're delivering nothing but more attacks, malware, and junk. If people want us to keep doing that we can, but why would they want us to keep doing that when we can see it, scoop it, study it, and stop it?" Lest someone should contend that AT&T and other carriers are merely licking their chops at the prospect of adding pricey new security services to their products, the expert said security services should eventually become a set of non-optional capabilities included with the purchase of ISP and telephony services. Much as the carrier community focused on providing faster services in the 1980s and added tools to improve quality to their products in the 1990s, the CIO said that security services will become a de facto element of all the capabilities that the firms market. While early adopters are already paying a premium to use the security capabilities offered by carriers today, eventually the price should be blended into the packages of capabilities that companies buy from providers such as AT&T, the expert predicted. At the same time, AT&T and other carriers would have to sacrifice their existing businesses of selling firewall management and intrusion detection-type systems into enterprises, he said. But the move to push security tools to the bandwidth providers is one that has been made even more likely by the complexity of those technologies. "I think we'll come out of this decade thinking it was silly to have separate perimeter security systems, it doesn't make sense to build the network and overlay security as an afterthought," Amoroso said. "We have as large of a managed security services business as anyone, but this work is better off embedded in the pipeline." Emerging mobile and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services will also include integrated security capabilities that replace many of the systems being implemented to protect those technologies today, according to the AT&T CIO. "We can virtualize these things, and any carrier can do it; this is the direction that perimeter security is headed in. It's not a collision course, but rather something very pleasant, as finally there's something smooth and simple to solve these problems," he said. "It's absurd that all we hear today is that the carrier plays no role in all of this, that companies should do it at the edge. We know it's a lot of work, but we're already prepared to do it."
359417
Beware the wily ways of credit card companies.
576116
'Worse than P2P' The Recording Industry Ass. of America has now attacked a company that provides access to internet newsgroups.â¦
298057
Storm Trojan fingered in tempest Prominent anti-spam services came under a sustained denial of service attack late last week. The assault targeted Spamhaus, Spam URI Realtime Blocklists (SURBL), and Realtime URI Blacklist (URIBL).â¦
531535
Phisher 'Vladuz' dodges eBay's defenses &gt;&gt; Advertisement &lt;&lt;  ALERT: "How A Hacker Launches A Blind SQL Injection Attack Step-by-Step"!" - White Paper  Blind SQL Injection can deliver total control of your server to a hacker giving them the ability to read, write and manipulate all data stored in your backend systems! Download this *FREE* white paper from SPI Dynamics for a complete guide to protection! https://download.spidynamics.com/1/ad/bsq.asp?Campaign_ID=701600000004c29