How many sites do you log into? Bank, email, shopping, work tools, social networks — each one wants a password, and serious sites add rules about length or character types. You already know not to use the same password everywhere. Recycling variants (david1, david2, david3) is not much better: one leak still maps to the rest. For what weak choices look like in the wild, see Passwords used by the Conficker worm. ...
The U.S. Census Bureau is warning of phishing and other scams that are using the 2010 Census as bait. Here is the warning from the bureau’s web site: If you are contacted for any of the following reasons — Do Not Participate. It is NOT the U.S. Census Bureau. Phishing: ‘Phishing’ is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, social security numbers, bank account or credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Phishing is typically carried out by email and it often directs users to enter sensitive information at a fake web site whose look and feel are almost identical to the legitimate one. ...
Right! A site registered in the state of “Taliban.” You’re really going to go to a site with this registration: Nice work SANS. Thanks to Daniel Wesemann at SANS: http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=8350
Want a place to check the legitimacy of a charity? “Founded in 2001, Charity Navigator has become the nation’s largest and most-utilized evaluator of charities. In our quest to help donors, our team of professional analysts has examined tens of thousands of non-profit financial documents. As a result, we know as much about the true fiscal operations of charities as anyone. We’ve used this knowledge to develop an unbiased, objective, numbers-based rating system to assess the financial health of over 5,000 of America’s best-known charities.” ...
In the same way that media event X guarantees Rogue Antispyware Y, a new and highly anticipated videogame that’s about ready to launch will similarly bring out the scams and fakes. If you have any family members that like their PC games but perhaps aren’t clued up on their Internet fakeouts, you might want to warn them that no matter how cool the so-called “Battlefield: Bad Company 2” keygens look, they should steer clear: ...
“Big Brother Brazil” is a Brazilian reality TV program adapted from the popular Big Brother television series. The show is about a group of people living together in a purpose-built Big Brother house, isolated from the outside world, while being monitored by cameras 24×7. The television series is viewed by scores of people during primetime hours, but live feeds are also available from multiple cameras in the house on the Web. Part of the popularity is due to the fact that some of the videos are suitable only for adult viewing. ...
According to latest State of Spam and Phishing report, scam and phishing messages accounted for 21 percent of all spam, which is the highest level recorded since the inception of the report. For comparison, these types of spam represented only 10 percent of total spam a year ago. Historically, the primary vector for spam attacks was to blast out as many messages as possible, hoping that someone would open a message and click on the call to action. The call to action could be anything from clicking on a link to purchase medications, to visiting an adult website. While we continue to see high volumes of spam originating from expansive botnets, spammers are also moving towards a sophisticated and more targeted approach to spam. Two primary examples of this trend are 419/Nigerian type scams and phishing messages. ...
A new KOOBFACE variant is again making the rounds in the social-networking scene. According to Trend Micro researcher, Norman Ingal, the malware employs Facebook’s Private Message feature to proliferate. The threat arrives as a Facebook private message that does not bear a subject but contains a supposed link to a YouTube video. Taking a closer look at the link, however, indicates that it is not an authentic YouTube link as in previous attacks. ...
Here’s a new vector: exploiting a Windows vulnerability through an Internet Explorer help menu Visual Basic script: “get ‘em to hit F1 and you own ‘em.” Microsoft is warning of a VBScript vulnerability in Internet Explorer (on Win2K, XP and Server03) that could be used to run malicious code. A malicious operator could create a web site that displays a specially crafted dialog box and prompts a victim to press the F1 key (help menu.) The exploit could then execute malicious code on a victim machine. (Windows versions that are not vulnerable are: Vista, Win7, Server08 R2 and Server08.) ...
More than 60 websites have been found to be hotbeds for SEO poisoning. Each of these domains host hundreds of possible matches for search keys. Also, the topics in one domain overlap with that of the other domain, thus making it possible that they will both emerge in the search results. Topics range from the Winter Olympics Luge Crash to the death of Alexander McQueen and even to NASCAR Schedule. ...
Last month, Baidu, the leading search engine in China, filed suit against US-based Internet registrar Register.com, in a legal event that took place at the height of the debate over Google’s continued business dealings with China. Baidu accused the registrar of changing its DNS records, so that customers were redirected to a completely different site purporting to represent the “Iranian Cyber Army.” But that original suit was heavily redacted, so we didn’t know the specifics of the alleged defacement. This week, US District Court in New York released the unredacted version of Baidu’s complaint, and now, as the man once said, we know the rest of the story. ...
Very funny: The story starts with an guy insulting everyone on the IRC channel. Most people there believed it was rather funny, but it got even more funny. For information: The dangerous hacker is called bitchchecker and the one being hacked and original author of the comments, who is talking here, is known as Elch. 127.0.0.1 is always the IP-adress of the computer you’re currently using, any request there will return to your computer. ...
Follow up from: Twitter phished? It’s an easy mistake We’ve received some questions regarding recent phishing attacks conducted against Twitter.com. Tweets and Direct Messages (DM) containing phases such as “This you??” or “LOL is this you” are linking victims towards a Twitter login phishing page. If the bait is taken and victim enters their password, Twitter’s infamous “fail whale” is displayed and the user is returned to their account. They might not even realize that their account details have been compromised. ...
London, England (CNN) — Twitter this week endured a number of “phishing” attacks, in which some users unwittingly gave out their passwords to malicious sites. Haven’t we all learned to keep our passwords to ourselves, you ask_?_ Perhaps. But the truth is we’re all vulnerable to social engineering, and two major Web trends are creating further confusion for new Internet users. The anatomy of these attacks is simple: You receive a message, seemingly from a friend on a social network. The message contains a link and some strong incentive to click it — in the case of the most recent Twitter attack, the note simply asks “This You????.” When you click the link, you’re prompted to log in again to view the page. ...
Follow up from: Free FakeAV at Virus-Total (That’s not VirusTotal) VirusTotal.com [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirusTotal.com] is a brilliant site that helps both public and researchers alike determine if an executable file they have is potentially malicious or not. Julio Canto (of VirusTotal fame) has noticed that somebody decided to cash in on the good name of the site with the following domain: virus-total(dot)in Go there, and you’ll see a message claiming the site is a “free online antivirus scanning service, click SCAN to begin scanning:“ ...