A booby-trapped e-mail that promises free sex movies is racking up victims around the world, warn security firms. Some variants of the Windows worm contain a link to PDF that a recipient has been told to expect. Those clicking on the link get neither movies nor documents but give the malware access to their entire Outlook address book. When installed, the worm sends copies of itself to every e-mail address it can find.

The malicious e-mail messages have a subject line saying "Here you have" and contain a weblink that looks like it connects to a PDF document. Instead it actually links to a website hosting the malware.

(Source: BBC)

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BBC

Experts from nearly 40 countries gathered in the Estonian capital Tallinn to discuss the latest issues in the fight against virtual attackers. Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves opened the conference with a stark warning about the seriousness of cybercrime. "Our critical infrastructure, electricity grids, transportation networks and mobile phone networks are so enmeshed and tied to the internet that any open society is open to complete and utter failure," he said. "There are no smoking guns, no foot or fingerprints in virtual reality," Estonia's Minister of Defence Jaak Aviksoo added.

Skilled hackers at the conference said malware designed to be used in attacks could be purchased for a few hundred dollars online, or even downloaded for free.

(Source: BBC)

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BBC

Police have arrested 178 people in Europe and the United States suspected of cloning credit cards in an international scam worth over 20 million euros ($24.52 million), Spanish police said on Tuesday. Police in fourteen countries participated a two-year investigation, initiated in Spain where police have discovered 120,000 stolen credit card numbers and 5,000 cloned cards, arrested 76 people and dismantled six cloning labs. The raids were made primarily in Romania, France, Italy, Germany, Ireland and the United States, with arrests also made in Australia, Sweden, Greece, Finland and Hungary.

(Source: Reuters)

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Reuters

Federal chief information officers and chief information security officers will convene Monday, June 14, at an annual information technology conference where they are sure to discuss the Office of Management and Budget's mandate to look toward cloud computing to cut IT costs, increase efficiencies and enable greater government-wide collaboration and data exchange. In examining the potential benefits and vulnerabilities of moving their services to the cloud, government CIOs and CISOs should ask and demand answers to some difficult questions.

Does your provider ensure the confidentiality, integrity and availability with mature processes, proof of past performance, understanding of and mechanisms for disaster recovery options, and encrypted backups?

(Source: GovInfo Security)

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GovInfo Security

The number of internet threats coming from the UK has increased in May, according to research by managed security firm, Network Box. The UK is now responsible for nearly six (5.9) per cent of the world’s internet viruses, up from three per cent in April. The only countries that produce more viruses than the UK are Korea (16.26 per cent) and the US (11.68 per cent). The US and India continue to dominate the production of the world’s spam, with the US producing 10.7 per cent, and India 7.1 per cent (similar figures from last month).

Russia has seen a decline in viruses produced from within its borders – possibly an early result of Russian hosting service, PROXIEZ-NET – notoriously used by criminal gangs – being taken down earlier this month.

(Source: Network Box)

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Network Box

Internet security firm Sophos has warned Facebook users to be on the alert for a scam which sends a spam message to all of their friends on the social network. Sophos, in a pair of blog posts late Monday, said "hundreds of thousands" of Facebook users have fallen for the scam which it dubbed "likejacking." It said some Facebook users had received a message such as "This man takes a picture of himself EVERYDAY for 8 YEARS!!" and were encouraged to click on a link. "This of course posts a message to your newsfeed, your friends see it and click on it, and so it spreads," Sophos said.

That followed a similar scam that spread on Facebook the week before involving a fake posting tagged as the "sexiest video ever," according to Sophos.

(Source: AFP)

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AFP

According to the latest data by Trend Micro, a leading Internet security company, more than 2 million computers were hacked and 476 million spam e-mails were sent in Turkey between June 2009 and May 2010. With Internet an increasingly integral part of daily life, criminals are finding new playgrounds in cyberspace.

In 2004 there were 680 million Internet users and 3 million malwares globally. Six years later, the number of Internet users increased to around 1.7 billion, but malwares jumped 10-fold to 30 million. The nature of the Internet also makes it harder to track down a criminal of cyber crime, as it crosses borders and is hard to understand. “It is not like a bank robbery. There is no eyewitness or video footage,”

(Source: Hurriyet Daily News)

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Hurriyet Daily News

A few weeks ago I came across several email messages in Spanish purporting to have been sent by Western Union: As you can see, this is a typical message sent as spam that we have seen in many guises. It tries to pass itself off as some kind of official notification from well-known companies -anyone from UPS to Apple or even Panda- with the real aim of trying to trick users into running the attached file. However, this time when I saw the message I couldn’t help but smile. Why? Because I thought there was a certain irony about the message claiming to have been sent by Western Union, a company used by virtually all cyber-criminals.

Should we be pointing an accusatory finger at companies like Western Union? There are those who would argue that this is like criminalizing the Internet just because there are users that abuse its services. Fair enough. But if Western Union is just like any other company, why is it used so insistently by criminals?

(Source: PandaLabs)

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PandaLabs

Carders.cc, a German online forum dedicated to helping criminals trade and sell financial data stolen through hacking, has itself been hacked. The once-guarded contents of its servers are now being traded on public file-sharing networks, leading to the exposure of potentially identifying information on the forum’s users as well as countless passwords and credit card accounts swiped from unsuspecting victims.

The breach involves at least three separate files being traded on Rapidshare.com: The largest is a database file containing what appear to be all of the communications among nearly 5,000 Carders.cc forum members, including the contents of private, one-to-one messages that subscribers to these forums typically use to negotiate the sale of stolen goods. Another file includes the user names, e-mail addresses and in many cases the passwords of Carder.cc forum

(Source: Krebs on Security)

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Krebs on Security

Du 17 au 21 mai 2010 se tient à Ouagadougou un atelier sur la cybersécurité. Avec comme objectif de former les acteurs chargés de la sécurisation du cyberespace à la lutte efficace contre les cybermenaces, cette session connaît la participation de délégués de la Côte d’Ivoire, du Ghana, du Mali et du Nigeria. Les travaux dudit séminaire ont été ouverts par le Secrétaire général du Premier ministère, Paul Marie Compaoré.

Face aux spams, scams, virus, vers et autres cyberattaques, il est plus qu’urgent de développer des stratégies et des dispositifs de pointe à même de sécuriser les systèmes du cyberespace en le protégeant de toutes ces cybermenaces. C’est dans cette optique que l’Union internationale des télécommunications (UIT), en partenariat avec IMPACT et l’Autorité de régulation des communications électroniques (ARCE) du Burkina, organise du 17 au 21 mai 2010, un atelier sur la cybersécurité.

(Source: Le Faso)

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Le Faso

Phishing may not be the most sophisticated form of cyber crime, but it can be a lucrative trade for those who decide to make it their day jobs. Indeed, data secretly collected from an international phishing operation over 18 months suggests that criminals who pursue a career in phishing can reap millions of dollars a year, even if they only manage to snag just a few victims per scam.

Phishers often set up their fraudulent sites using ready-made “phish kits” — collections of HTML, text and images that mimic the content found at major banks and e-commerce sites. Typically, phishers stitch the kits into the fabric of hacked, legitimate sites, which they then outfit with a “backdoor” that allows them to get back into the site at any time.

(Source: Krebs on Security)

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Krebs on Security

With the 2010 FIFA World Cup less than two months away, cybercriminals (as expected) are banking on this prestigious international football event to trick users. TrendLabsSM spotted the latest threat involving this, and it came in the form of an email message currently being spammed in the wild.

The spam carried a .PDF file attachment which was found to contain details about the lottery the recipient allegedly won. It also instructed the recipient to give out personal information and send them to the contact person or email sender before the prize could be claimed. What was interesting about the purported sender of the email—one Mrs. Michelle Matins, Executive Vice President—was also the signatory for the 419 scam, aka the Nigeria scam.

(Source: Trend Micro)

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Trend Micro

As much heat as Facebook has taken recently for its privacy policies and the freedom with which it shares data across the Web and around the world, Facebook is still not the biggest threat to online privacy--you are. A study by Consumer Reports illustrates that users are really their own worst enemy when it comes to online privacy.

Here are some of the key findings of the Consumer Reports survey: • A projected 1.7 million online households had experienced online identity theft in the past year. • An estimated 5.4 million online consumers submitted personal information to e-mail (phishing) scammers during the past two years. • Among adult social network users, 38 percent had posted their full birth date, including year. Forty-five percent of those with children had posted their children's photos. And 8% had posted their own street address. • An estimated 5.1 million online households had experienced some type of abuse on a social network in the past year, including malware infections, scams, and harassment.

(Source: PC World)

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PC World

Google is investigating a growing number of reports that hackers are breaking into legitimate Gmail accounts and then using them to send spam messages. The problem started about a week ago but seems to have escalated over the past few days.

"The Gmail team takes security very seriously and is investigating the reports we've seen in our user forums over the past few days," Google said Tuesday in an e-mailed statement. "We encourage users who suspect their accounts have been compromised to immediately change their passwords and to follow the advice at the following page: http://www.google.com/help/security/." Gmail accounts are often compromised after phishing attempts or via malicious programs, which can seek out and log online credentials from a hacked computer.

(Source: ComputerWorld)

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ComputerWorld

A new type of malware infects PCs using file-share sites and publishes the user's net history on a public website before demanding a fee for its removal. The Japanese trojan virus installs itself on computers using a popular file-share service called Winni, used by up to 200m people. It targets those downloading illegal copies of games in the Hentai genre, an explicit form of anime. Website Yomiuri claims that 5500 people have so far admitted to being infected.

"If you find you are getting pop-ups demanding payments to settle copyright infringement lawsuits, ignore them and use a free online anti-malware scanner immediately to check for malware," said Mr Ferguson.

(Source: BBC)

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BBC

A computer security researcher has released a plugin for Firefox that provides a wealth of data on Web sites that may have been compromised with malicious code. The plugin, called Fireshark, was released on Wednesday at the Black Hat conference. The open-source free tool is designed to address the shortcomings in other programs used to analyze malicious Web sites, said Stephan Chenette, a principal security researcher at Websense, which lets Chenette develop Fireshark in the course of his job. Hackers often target legitimate Web sites with code that can either infect a machine with malicious software or redirect a user to a bad Web page.

(Source: InfoWorld)

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InfoWorld

Countries in Asia now face the same level and type of sophisticated cyber attack as countries in the West, according to a new report from non-profit US cyber-crime research organisation Team Cymru.

Countries in Asia now face the same level and type of sophisticated cyber attack as countries in the West, according to a new report from non-profit US cyber-crime research organisation Team Cymru. "We would expect to see high concentrations of compromised machines in areas with high concentrations of Internet saturation and urban population," said Team Cymru director, global outreach, and former Scotland Yard detective, Steve Santorelli.

(Source: IDG Connect)

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IDG Connect

In a bid to cut down on fraud and inappropriate content, the organization responsible for administering Russia's .ru top-level domain names is tightening its procedures. Starting April 1, anyone who registers a .ru domain will need to provide a copy of their passport or, for businesses, legal registration papers.

Loopholes in the domain name system help spammers, scammers and operators of pornographic Web sites to avoid detection on the Internet by concealing their identity. Criminals often play a cat-and-mouse game with law enforcement and security experts, popping up on different domains as soon as their malicious servers are identified. Criminals in eastern Europe have used .ru domains for a while, registering domain names under fake identities and using them to send spam or set up command-and-control servers to send instructions to networks of hacked computers.

(Source: PC World)

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PC World

Spam levels have not been dented by a series of strikes against controllers of networks of hijacked computers. Early 2010 has seen four such networks, or botnets, tackled via arrests, net access cutoffs and by infiltrating command systems. The successes have not inconvenienced hi-tech criminals who found other routes to send spam, say experts. And, they add, despite falling response rates, spam remains too lucrative for criminals to abandon.

"Most non-commercial spam these days is aimed solely to get you to click on a link, even out of curiosity," he said. "As soon as you click on that link, you're infected, most likely to become yet another botnet victim, have your identity and information stolen and go on to participate, all unknowingly in the infection of further victims."

(Source: BBC)

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BBC

The government has added fresh resources to the fight against cybercrime with the launch of a £4.3m programme to help combat fraud, estimated to cost UK consumers £3.5bn per year. The programme, which aims to take down scam websites, was launched by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills this week. Under the scheme, up to 300 of the UK's approximately 3,000 existing trading standards officers will receive "intermediate" level training in tackling cybercrime.

In addition, a new cyber enforcement team within the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) will be set up. The team will lead investigations into websites selling fake or non-existent goods, tickets or services online, and will have an attached digital forensics lab that will be available to all OFT staff.

(Source: Silicon)

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Silicon

Twitter launched a new link-screening service on Tuesday aimed at preventing phishing and other malicious attacks against users of the popular microblogging service.

Phishing scams on Twitter usually involve attackers trying to obtain the login credentials of Twitter users, and then sending spam messages from the stolen accounts in a bid to make money, Twitter said on its blog last month. Twitter also fights phishing scams by watching for affected accounts and resetting passwords, it said. Phishing attacks ballooned on Twitter last year as the service grew in popularity. Twitter's new link-screening service comes after it last year started using Google's Safe Browsing API to check for malicious content in links posted by users.

(Source: PC World)

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PC World

Hackers breaking into businesses and government agencies with targeted attacks have not only stolen intellectual property, in some cases they have corrupted data too, the head of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation said Thursday. The United States has been under assault from these targeted spear-phishing attacks for years, but they received mainstream attention in January, when Google admitted that it had been hit and threatened to pull its business out of China -- the presumed source of the attack -- as a result.

Researchers investigating the Google attack -- thought to have affected at least 100 companies including Intel, Adobe and Symantec -- say that prime targets of the hackers were the source code management systems used by software developers to build code.

(Source: PC World)

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PC World

Authorities have smashed one of the world's biggest networks of virus-infected computers, a data vacuum that stole credit cards and online banking credentials from as many as 12.7 million poisoned PCs. The "botnet" of infected computers included PCs inside more than half of the Fortune 1,000 companies and more than 40 major banks, according to investigators.

Spanish investigators, working with private computer-security firms, have arrested the three alleged ringleaders of the so-called Mariposa botnet, which appeared in December 2008 and grew into one of the biggest weapons of cybercrime. More arrests are expected soon in other countries.

(Source: The New Zealand Herald)

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The New Zealand Herald

Security experts are split over the effectiveness of Microsoft's efforts to shut down a network of PCs that could send 1.5 billion spam messages a day. The firm persuaded a US judge to issue a court order to cripple 277 internet domains used by the Waledac botnet. Botnets are usually armies of hijacked Windows PCs that send spam or malware. "We aim to be more proactive in going after botnets to help protect the internet," said Richard Boscovich, the head of Microsoft's digital crime unit.

Security firm Symantec has estimated that over 80% of unsolicited e-mail comes from botnets.

(Source: BBC)

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BBC