Scams

[Update 30th October 2013: with regard to the ping gambit discussed below, please note that protection.com now responds to ICMP echo requests – in other words, if you now run the command “ping protection.com” you should now see a screen something like this: Note that this is perfectly normal behaviour for a site that responds

Twitter has been hit by a wave of spam promising “pure garcinia cambogia” – a vegetable extract used in weight loss supplements. High-profile accounts such as Jane Fonda’s fell victim, with attackers compromising Hootsuite accounts to gain entry.

A new study aims to identify the sort of people who are most likely to fall for phishing scams – and has found that women, introverts and the overconfident are more likely to confuse “real” email with phishing scams.

My colleagues at ESET Ireland, report that an all-too-familiar scam is currently hitting Irish mailboxes. I’ve talked about it at some length here previously – for instance here and here – but here’s a quick summary. Someone, apparently someone you know (a friend or a family member) contacts you to tell you that they’ve been

[A shorter version of this article was originally published – without illustrations – on the Anti-Phishing Working Group’s eCrime blog.] Phishing attacks targeting academia aren’t the most high-profile of attacks, though they’re more common than you might think. Student populations in themselves constitute a sizeable pool of potential victims for money mule recruitment and other

Atlantic Media CTO Tom Cochran emailed employees a fake phishing email supposedly from “Google Apps”, and found that 58% clicked the link.

Instagram users were bombarded with pictures of fruit over the weekend in a spam attack that swept the photo-sharing network.

A telemarketing company has been hit with a $7.5m fine for repeatedly contacting people on the Do Not Call Registry – the largest civil penalty ever issued in a Do Not Call case.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before… While I was in London recently for the InfoSec exhibition and some other meetings, my wife received a call from a lady with a heavy Indian accent, who told her that she had errors on her computer caused by viruses, and offering to remove them for her. For a fee, of course…

In the wake of the cowardly and despicable bombings in Boston today, people who want to help need to be wary of appeals for money for victims or schemes like retweeting and “Likes” on Facebook.

Emailed wedding invitations have popped back up as a way to distribute malware Will this tactic join other malware-email staples like malicious tax season messages.

The new ESET blog format must be striking a real chord with people. At any rate, job offers are just pouring in. Except that they don’t seem to be jobs for security bloggers, or for web developers like the team that maintains this site.

Answers to common questions about tax season scams in America and advice about fending off the malicious activity that seeks to exploit tax matters.

Below, you can see the textual part of a bank phishing email I received today (it also contained a Smile logo, which was the only graphical content).  Here’s the message text from the phishing email:  Dear Account Holder, Do you know that with Smile Internet banking, you can eliminate the cost of receiving and transferring

An invite to a conference in California proves to be a scam, and a very similar spam claims the very same conference is taking place in New York in March.

In a world where nothing seems to be constant but change, it’s good to know that there are, in fact, some things that change fairly slowly. Unfortunately, readiness to believe and spread hoaxes is one of them.

Money for nothing? Don’t believe it: a variation on the Mystery Shopper scam that misuses the Pinecone Research brand.

Two rough and ready phishing emails that nevertheless tell us a great deal about the social engineering underlying more sophisticated, graphic-rich scams.

The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) fined two owners of a marketing company £440,000 ($713,000) for bombarding the public with millions of unlawful spam texts over a period of three years. It’s the first time that the ICO has used its power to issue a monetary penalty for a serious breach of the UK Privacy

Many of us now buy goods and services online for the convenience and savings. The experts at ESET put together this guide to safer online shopping so you get the goods you want, and no nasty surprises. Tune your shopping machine Like the tune-up your car gets before a long drive, your laptop may need

Tempted to invest in colour diamonds or collectible bottles of wine? That irresistible offer could be a boiler room scam.