Earlier this month, we reported on the massive new Koobface campaign making the rounds through Facebook and how it tricked users into downloading and running it through that tenet of social engineering, the fake codec. We now have a video showing how the Koobface worm tricks users into running it: NOTE: The audio is not
From time to time I hear people who don’t use antivirus software claim that it doesn’t matter, there isn’t anything of value on their computer. To begin with, just controlling your computer is of value to some criminals. If I can control your computer I can get paid to send spam from it, to install
Last week Al Quaeda cyberterrorism attack information was declassified and made public. Today’s New York Times had an applicable editorial to whether cybersecurity issues are over-blown or under-believed: Predictions of disaster have always been ignored — that is why there is a Cassandra myth — but it is hard to think of a time when
I’ve just read a news item about a nine year old boy who has been accused of hacking into his school’s computer system. It seems police claim the nine year old hacked into the Blackboard Learning System used by his school to change teacher’s and staff member’s passwords, change and delete course content and change
The Boston Globe suggested that changing passwords is a waste of time, based on their interpretation of an article by Herley Cormac. Cormac’s paper – well worth reading, by the way – reinforces a point that has been made many times both by me and by the “user education doesn’t work” lobby. While I don’t believe that education is useless,
I find it hard to not be shocked at a headline like this… Then I remembered the recent top cybercrime city survey conducted by one of our competing software vendors which had Boston ranked the SECOND HIGHEST risk city in the entire United States. I’m also not one to simply lie down and let cybercriminals
Mario Vuksan, Tomislav Pericin and Brian Karney have been talking…about vulnerabilities they’ve found in various compression formats … as well as their potential for steganographical use or misuse…. Perhaps the main problems here will not be technical vulnerabilitiese but careless users and social engineering attacks.
Clearly, anything which is posted online should be assumed to be eternal, written in stone tablets, and admissible for all time. For the early adopter (Internet, blogger, Friendster, etc.) this also operates as a reminder of the ever-powerful TOS change: just because the terms of service (TOS) say that your content is private now never
According to FBI Cyber Division Director Chabinsky’s keynote speech last week the supporting elements of a somewhat clannish and tribal entity such as a cybercrime organization are also specialized and diverse in the 21st century:
After posting the article regarding this new legislature I continued my research into the objections which have been raised by many cyber activists. Some of the concern is about ‘Net Neutrality’ and the potential for abuse of power. Let’s look first at the issue of content-neutral or client-neutral packet routing. Net Neutrality – A Deeper
Insider Threat – your ATM may now be hacked from the inside. According to Wired’s Threat Level Blog… A Bank of America worker installed malicious software on his employer’s ATMs that allowed him to make thousands of dollars in fraudulent withdrawals, all without leaving a transaction record, according to federal prosecutors. According to the
According to the CBO report quoted in this graphic, three dollars from every citizen of the United States each year for four years is what the final cost will be. We’re talking about the amped up Cybersecurity Enhancement Act of 2010 (HR 4061) currently passed by the House of Representatives. This can easily be confused
Interesting news this week with some heavy anticrime work in Russia resulting in the arrests of the alleged RBS Worldbank cybercriminals. In related research I had to laugh out loud at this particular turn of phrase reported by the Financial Times; The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB)has detained suspects including Viktor Pleshchuk, an alleged mastermind
Allow me to frame the threat of cybercrime that we all face by quoting from Jeff Debrosse’s 2009 Cybersecurity Review white paper: Cybercriminals are global and often well organized. They are smaller and more maneuverable than most corporations. Some are sheltered by certain G8 economic countries’ policies and laws. Their thefts fuel their home country’s
We have discussed SEO poisoning extensively in the ESET Threat Blog, and it should come as no surprise to our readers that any topic which trends up quickly in search engine traffic will be exploited by the criminals who specialize in such activities. The poisoned search term du jour is “erin andrews death threat”. Apparently,
A short time ago I was watching someone I know type in a password to an important web site. I wasn’t looking to see what the password was, however I noticed it wasn’t long and it was all entered on the numeric keypad. This is someone who is not a security expert, but has heard
September 2009 saw some key security analysis raining directly onto the Adobe PDF platform, particularly with SANS pointing towards remote code execution within PDFs as one of the top threat vectors: Adobe Acrobat, Reader, and Flash Player Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2009-1862) Adobe Reader Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2009-1493) Kudos to Adobe for patching these
SANS posted a story at the Internet Storm Center a couple of days ago that they were seeing fake email from the IRS. (Even I don’t have time to read everything on the Internet relating to current information security issues.) The emails described try to kid the victim that they’ve under-reported or failed to report
A couple of weeks ago I posted an entry on here about the size of the cybercrime problem from a dollar perspective. I pointed out that is was reported that US banks had lost US$40 million per month for the third quarter of 2009 due to online banking fraud. Also, the 2009 Internet Crime Report
About a month ago I gave a presentation in Kuala Lumpur that covered some of the concerns about the seemingly enthusiastic rush to push everything out “to the cloud”. People in the Marketing business love the term “cloud computing” and have come up with some lovely images of fluffy clouds reflected on office blocks and
[Interim updates removed: later information on Twitter profile attacks and Blackhat SEO attacks using keywords related to this topic to spread malware, has been made public in a later blog at http://www.eset.com/blog/2010/03/30/here-come-more-of-the-ghouls.] Following this morning’s bombings in the Moscow Metro (subway system), Aryeh Goretsky suggests the likelihood of criminals using “blackhat SEO” (search engine optimization