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Archive for the ‘Government and Cybersecurity’ Category
Saturday, March 13th, 2010
The Fbi released its Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) 2009 report. The organization maintains that cyberfraud losses reported to them doubled year over year.
The report contains what appears to be significant changes. The report includes mention of the FakeAv scams that have plaqued users over the past couple of years. Another friend just brought in a laptop screaming “Your system is infected!” yesterday, most likely due to a banner ad drive-by. At this point, it’s hard to believe that the fraud is not occuring on a large enough scale to quantify the criminal activity.
The report provides list of the most common complaints that the IC3 received in 2009, including spam, identity theft, credit card fraud, and computer damage, all things that an additional layer of protection like ThreatFire effectively helps protect your system against.
Complaints of internet crime, including spam and fraud, should be filed here, in addition to making other appropriate contacts. They can’t report on what is not filed.
Posted in Click Fraud, Crimeware, Fbi, Government and Cybersecurity, Incident, Rogueware, Scams and Monetization, Spam, Uncategorized, cybercrime | No Comments »
Monday, March 8th, 2010
The Bangkok Post’s article on a Malaysian man’s arrest and extradition to the U.S., charged with identity theft, a part of a prosecution begun in 2008, exposes potentially the 12th person known only by his handle “Delpiero”. The man will be extradited for theft and sale of over 40 million credit card numbers and personal information. From a 2008 article reporting the original case:
“Indictments against Hung-Ming Chiu and Zhi Zhi Wang, both of China, and a person known only by the online nickname “Delpiero” were also unsealed in San Diego.”
Damages from the hack(s) were not estimated in 2008: ‘”They used sophisticated computer hacking techniques that would allow them to breach security systems and install programs that gathered enormous quantities of personal financial data, which they then allegedly either sold to others or used themselves,” Attorney General Michael Mukasey said at a news conference. “And in total, they caused widespread losses by banks, retailers, and consumers. Mukasey called the total dollar amount of the alleged theft “impossible to quantify at this point”‘, but the Bangkok Post article seems to cite an estimated $150 million for the ring’s take.
Posted in Crimeware, Fbi, Government and Cybersecurity, Scams and Monetization, Security breach | 2 Comments »
Thursday, March 4th, 2010
The U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano was this morning’s keynote speaker at RSA Conference 2010, speaking about succeeding in the cybersecurity battle. She joins the list of prominent speakers this week, along with Symantec’s Enrique Salem on “Defeating the Enemy: The Road to Confidence”. The conference continues through the week, and you can keep up to date with links to interactive webcasts here.
This year’s Cryptographer’s Panel discussed some interesting work on the new MD6 hash algorithm within the SHA-3 Competition, and MD5 as a ”dead hash algorithm”. This talk marked hopefully the last year of commercial Md5 use, in light of Md5’s fairly substantial and vulnerable use by vendors, webmasters and Certificate Authorities up through the beginning of 2009. May its death arrive quickly and a new, performance sensitive MD6 born soon.
Posted in Conference, Government and Cybersecurity | No Comments »
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