Update: Security experts warn about Ernesto-related frauds
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(InfoWorld) - With tropical storm Ernesto now blowing off the coast of Florida, Internet security experts are warning that fraudsters may be hard at work claiming Ernesto-related Web site domains. On Tuesday, 18 domains related to the storm became live, said Johannes Ullrich, chief research officer at the SANS Institute. They include such names as Ernestoinsurance.com, Ernestomoney.com, and Ernestodamage.com. Ullrich's Web posting on this topic can beÂ found here. Scammers began cashing inÂ on natural disasters in a widespread way following the December 2004 earthquake and Tsunamis that killed hundreds of thousands in southeast Asia, Ullrich said. Last year there wereÂ reports of large-scale fraudÂ in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and parts of the U.S. Gulf Coast. In September, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation warned that more than half of the Hurricane Katrina aid sites that it had reviewed were registered to people outside of the U.S. and likely to be fraudulent. SANS saw about 1,000 Katrina-related domains registered in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Ullrich said. The majority of these domains were set up for what he called "domain parking," an attempt to make money by placing ads on a Web site that surfers seem likely to stumble upon. Ernestoinsurance.com, for example was registered by Julian Luby a graduate student in Portland, Oregon, who said he registered between 30 and 50 Ernesto-related domains, beginning Sunday. Luby registered the domains for the dual purposes of providing information on the storm and raising money for a group of social networking sites he is developing. Luby, who also registered the Ernestomoney.com and Ernestodamage.com sites, has listed many of his domains for sale, asking from $400 to $1,000 per domain. He is also maintaining a blog of Ernesto-related news on some of the sites. On one day shortly after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, more than 400 Katrina-related domains were registered. Ultimately dozens of the sites proved to be fraudulent, and Ullrich is worried that this pattern may repeat itself with Ernesto. However, it seems unlikely that Ernesto will attract the attention of Katrina, which was one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history. By Tuesday, the National Hurricane Center had downgraded Ernesto from hurricane to Tropical storm. "It doesn't look like Ernesto will amount to much, so I don't think we'll see much in terms of domain fraud," Ullrich said. But this is a pattern he expects scammers to repeat as other storms form during this 2006 hurricane season. "Basically they're waiting for the right hurricane to come around," he said. In any case, anyone looking to register Ernesto domain names may already be late to the game. The U.S. National Weather Service publishes its list of hurricane names years in advance, and many scammers have pre-registered their fraudulent sites, according to Rich Miller, an analyst with Web site tracking service Netcraft Ltd. "A lot of the premium names are long gone," he said. That list of National Weather Service's list of Hurricane names can beÂ found here.
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'I will be out of the office starting...' Ta very much to the anonymous reader who reported a suspicious email to HSBC's anti-phishing department and then forwarded us the result. Although he or she got a fairly comprehensive rundown on what to keep an eye out for in those dodgy "HSBC security alert" emails, the automated reply makes it clear that any personal feedback is unlikely for the next 44 years or so:â¦
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com December 28, 2004, 3:36 PM PT. Reporting a new crop of variants, a security firm warned that the Cabir cell phone malware is becoming more of a threat.
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RALEIGH, North Carolina  - Tropical Storm Ernesto   hit North Carolina near hurricane strength on Thursday, dumping   heavy rain on both Carolina states and forecasters warned it   could trigger life-threatening floods and tornadoes.
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Letter: Analysts observation not exactly earthshaking.
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Thousands of credit card numbers and other personal data may have been compromised.
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RALEIGH, North Carolina  - Tropical Storm Ernesto   dumped heavy rain on North and South Carolina as it closed in   on the U.S. East Coast near hurricane strength on Thursday, and   forecasters warned it could trigger life-threatening floods and   tornadoes.
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Tropical Storm Ernesto neared the southeastern US coast for the second time in two days, with a 50 percent chance it could regain hurricane strength before landfall, weather forecasters said.
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Security experts are saying plagues like programs that can delete address books, junk messages that flood a cell phone&#39;s inbox and a code that uses Bluetooth wireless technology to sneak onto handsets that target cell phones are only present in labs.
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He turned over a new leaf, and turned it back again: A man previously convinced of hacking hundreds of military and government computers has been busted again, this time for massive credit-card theft. In between he became -- what else? -- a well-known security researcher.
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The&#160;Storm Worm&#39;s days may be numbered, according to a University of California researcher.Brandon Enright, a network security analyst at UC San Diego, has been tracking Storm since July and said that, despite the intense publicity that the network of infected computers has received, it&#39;s actually been shrinking steadily and is presently a shadow of its former self. On Saturday, he presented his findings at the Toorcon hacker conference in San Diego.Storm is not really a computer worm. It&#39;s a network of computers that have been infected via malicious e-mail messages, and are centrally controlled via the Overnet P-to-P protocol. Enright said he has developed software that crawls through the Storm network and he thinks that he has a pretty accurate estimate of how big Storm really is.Some estimates have put Storm at 50 million computers, a number that would give its controllers access to more processing power than the world&#39;s most powerful supercomputer. But Enright said that the real story is significantly less terrifying. In July, for example, he said that Storm appeared to have infected about 1.5 million PCs, about 200,000 of which were accessible at any given time.Enright guessed that a total of about 15 million PCs have been infected by Storm in the nine months it has been around, although the vast majority of those have been cleaned up and are no longer part of the Storm network.Since July, it&#39;s been downhill for Storm. That&#39;s when antivirus vendors began stepping up their tracking of Storm variants and got a lot better at identifying and cleaning up infected computers, Enright said.Then on September 11, Microsoft added Storm detection (Microsoft&#39;s name for Storm&#39;s components is Win32/Nuwar) into its Malicious Software Removal tool, which ships with every Windows system. Overnight, Storm infections dropped by another 20 percent.Today, Enright said that Storm is about one-tenth of its former size. His most recent data counts 20,000 infected PCs available at any one time, out of a total network of about 160,000 computers. &quot;The size of the network has been falling pretty rapidly and pretty consistently,&quot; he said.Still, Storm has had a remarkably successful run. It&#39;s called Storm because it first popped up in mid-January in spam e-mails that offered late-breaking information on powerful storms that had been battering Europe. Users who clicked on the &quot;Full Story.exe&quot; or &quot;Video.exe&quot; attachments that accompanied the spam were infected by malicious software, making them part of the Storm network.These machines were then used to send out more spam and launch attacks against other computers. The recent MP3 stock spam that was first spotted earlier this week was sent out by the Storm network, Enright said.Storm was effective because its creators were really good at creating messages that victims would feel compelled to click, Enright said. In its first few days, it managed to infect more than 300,000 computers, making it the worst malware outbreak since 2005. Its creators have since been masters at creating timely messages for their spam and have also had success getting victims to click on fake e-greeting cards.The Storm network itself is constantly changing, and has used a variety of technologies that have made it an interesting phenomenon to study. In addition to the peer to peer network, it has used rootkit software to disguise its presence on the PC and a server-switching technique called &quot;fast-flux,&quot; which makes the Storm servers harder to find on the network.It&#39;s also developed some interesting ways of keeping researchers like Enright at bay. &quot;If you&#39;re a researcher and you hit the pages hosting the malware too much... there is an automated process that automatically launches a denial of service [attack] against you,&quot; he said. This attack, which floods the victim&#39;s computer with a deluge of Internet traffic, knocked part of the UC San Diego network offline when it first struck.Lately Storm has been responsible for a large quantity of &quot;pump and dump&quot; spam, which tries to temporarily boost the price of penny stocks. But one area that does not seem to be of interest to Storm&#39;s creators is identity theft. &quot;Believe it or not, credit card numbers aren&#39;t worth that much money,&quot; Enright said. &quot;It&#39;s much better to make money... via pump and dump.&quot;&#160;
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High winds knocked down trees, created powerful waves and blew down utility lines yesterday, interrupting electricity to more than 200,000 homes and businesses as the remnants of Tropical Storm Ernesto swept through the region.
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Tropical Storm Ernesto formed Friday over the Caribbean as it moved toward Jamaica and the Cayman Islands and could develop into the first hurricane of the 2006 Atlantic season, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.
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A hurricane watch is issued for part of the Carolinas as Tropical Storm Ernesto gains strength over the Atlantic.
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Hovering just below hurricane strength and producing heavy rains, Tropical Storm Ernesto was moving inland over eastern North Carolina early today, the National Hurricane Center said. The storm's maximum sustained winds were at 65 mph.
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Ernesto, downgraded to a tropical  depression after a Thursday night landfall in North Carolina,  left more than 243,000 utility customers from North Carolina to  New Jersey without power late Friday.
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In a rare public warning to the power and utility industry, a CIA analyst this week said cyber attackers have hacked into the computer systems of utility companies outside the United States and made demands, in at least one case causing a power outage that affected multiple cities.