In Part 2 of our look at what you can expect in the coming year, faint rumblings out of Japan suggest that one prediction from Part 1 of this article has already come true. If the very real prospect of becoming an innocent casualty of war isn’t enough to make you run backward toward the year that just passed, these bold predictions reveal how hackers will develop an even stronger sense of camaraderie, and how mobility is sure to become a four-letter word. And if you thought spamming and Internet scams made it personal in 2011, you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

How about that? 2012 wasn’t even seven days old when news out of Japan this week revealed some eerie premonitions of the things to come and earmarks of a bold prediction made one week ago.  Engadget, ZD Net and other media outlets are reporting that the Japanese government has been working in concert with Fujitsu since 2008 to develop a powerful ‘cyber weapon’ – a piece of software that, upon the detection of a cyber attack (such as DDoS, for example) tracks the attack back to the source.

Sounds pretty straightforward, right? Sure, until you consider that the software also attacks and disables every machine it finds along the trail. The goal, Engadget reports:

“is to stop the spread of a malicious piece of code by finding and shutting down, not just the source, but all middleman PCs that are also now potential hosts. In some admittedly extreme scenarios this weapon could potentially spiral out of control, taking out far more computers than intended.”

Hmm… Botnets are nothing more than large numbers of unsuspecting computers carrying out their attacks at the behest of the infector and ignorance of the computer’s owner. Japan’s little toy, while it sounds like it might be fun to take for a spin, could have the unpleasant and unprecedented effect of being the cause of some serious collateral damage. Casualties of war? Here’s a tip for everyone: while you still have a chance, give that fave desktop or laptop of yours a great big hug before it’s too late.

1. Hackers of the World, Unite

Robin Hood met Mafia Boy last year as hacktivism took center stage. Indeed, 2011 was an entertaining year for anyone who followed the exploits of Anonymous and LulzSec. The drama unfolded like a kabuki play born in the mind of Ken Kesey and brought to life by a troupe of mimes with Tourette Syndrome, and there were even a few arrests along the way to make this reality show really…ahem… arresting.

Prediction: We will see some new hacking activity from these groups, with some high profile web takedowns in the process. While that’s not a stretch, this is: hacker groups like Anonymous and LulzSec will grow in size substantially, resembling an ‘occupy’ type movement that will take the war online. The civil and social unrest of 2011 will turn to face the financial behemoth that is the Internet.

2. Mobility Means Vulnerability

If we learned anything about spam in 2011, it’s that spam is like that proverbial bum of a brother-in-law who’s been living in your basement for the past two years. It’s not going away, good luck making it work for you, and you will be out-of-pocket at some point. Spammers continued to use every means at their disposal in 2011, with SMS spam becoming a real pain in the neck. Security flaws in the two most popular smartphone platforms – iOS and Android – just accented what we already suspected: that spammers and purveyors of malware had taken their show on the road.

Prediction: 2012 will see a massive increase in mobile spam, and mobile devices will become the swords upon which we will live or die unless we get mobile security under control.

3. It’s Nothing Personal…Well, Actually, It Is

A significant development in spam and phishing in 2011 was the way in which the scam artists were getting smarter; you know, smarter in much the same way that a chunk of igneous rock living at the bottom of a fetid riverbed is smarter than a rotting patch of lichen hanging for dear life to the side of an oak tree. Like it or not, the scambags are wilier, finding new and innovative ways to pick your pocket without actually residing in the same time zone.

Prediction: The scambags will become even cleverer in their assaults, finding new methods to lull people into a false sense of security. How this will occur remains to be seen, but our bold prediction is that it will most likely involve highly targeted, multilevel campaigns where the scammer will use detailed knowledge of the targets, and multiple contact methods like email, phone, SMS and even snail mail to enact their evil schemes.

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Bold Predictions for 2012 (Part 2)

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, and what better way to take a look back at the year in spam than poke a little fun at the moronic state of the crap that invades our inboxes? In a year that saw major security breaches, several high profile botnet takedowns, and an unprecedented surge in personalized scams and mobile spam, we stop to reflect upon it all and submit a simple postulate: what if Dr. Seuss had been a spammer?

As the year winds down to a close, it’s only basic human nature to look back at the year that just passed and reflect upon it. In the world of spamming and Internet scams, that’s bound to be a painfully long look, since this has been a year fraught with new scams, major cybercrime busts, and unprecedented levels of security threats. With mobile devices providing the newest threat opportunities, and SMS spam picking up a head of steam as scammers get creative, we must be even more vigilant when fighting spam-related threats.

What’s in store for 2012? One must shudder when imagining the possibilities. If anything like 2011, next year will represent an even more dangerous landscape, cluttered with mines and booby traps the likes of which we’ve never seen.

Dire prophecies and doomsday mentality aside, it doesn’t hurt to poke fun at spam once in a while, and during the holidays, no one is more fun than the venerable Theodor Seuss Geisel, known to adoring children and former children alike as Dr. Seuss. Like many households, it’s a holiday tradition around here to watch How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, an annual ritual which inspired this writer to wonder: what if Dr. Seuss was still with us, and what if, ahem, wait for it…Dr. Seuss was a spammer?

The thought itself is sure to bring a smile to the face of anyone who has endured the miserable drivel that infests inboxes like brown marmorated stink bugs. Poorly written and replete with ludicrous stories that must have been contrived during bad acid trips, these emails often frustrate us, and occasionally make us smile by virtue of their sheer stupidity. What they do not do, however, is give us any confidence that the human race is poised to survive much longer, if this epidemic of oafishness is representative of the current state of the gene pool.

So without further ado, here’s a humble attempt at imagining what spam might be like, if written by Dr. Seuss:

The Spammer Who Stole Christmas?

Dear stranger, forgive me for this intrusion

I hope my letter will ease your confusion.

I will not, cannot state it enough

This is rough stuff, even a little tough.

There’s a Libyan prince who lost his good fortune

And my offer to you is a share of the portion.

I cannot get the funds out of my land

And I hope you will aid me by lending a hand.

You see, there are sums in excess of millions

If you give me your name, I’ll give you gazillions.

It’s okay to give me personal information

They don’t extradite criminals in my tiny nation.

Your bank account and credit cards are essential

They’re only for scamming and merely referential.

This is for good cause, I must admit

Send money now and show you commit.

I do not wish to enter a heated debate

Send it fast, send it now, it cannot wait.

The funds are for my stately Kenyan mansion

It’s in great need of a major expansion.

Happy Holidays to all!

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If Dr. Seuss Was a Spammer

With Christmas just around the corner, the FBI can’t be accused of waiting until the last minute to get their Christmas shopping done. This week, the U.S. law enforcement agency – in partnership with several U.S.-based and international agencies – gave users around the world an early present when it announced the culmination of a two year operation dubbed ‘Operation Ghost Click’, which netted the Feds six Estonian nationals and saw the Christmas tree lights yanked on the infamous DNSChanger malware scam.

It’s been a busy year for the law enforcement community and its ongoing war against Internet crime, which has experienced some success with the takedown of two major botnets in Rustock and Coreflood. But global law enforcement agencies have frantically been creating a shopping list of new targets for investigation, which undoubtedly include a carousel of security breaches, both in major corporations and government departments, the wafting scent of state-sponsored and industrial hacking, the persistent and growing threat of hacktivism, and a raft of other exotic security threats. All of the above are wreaking havoc on the connected world, so when law enforcement wins one for the little guys, we damn well want to give credit where credit is due. We even have to send out kudos for coming up with a sexy name for a two-year long operation that saw six dirtbags paraded away in handcuffs. ‘Operation Ghost Click.’ How cool is that?

Anyone familiar with malware should be all-too-familiar with the DNSChanger scam, a Trojan horse distributed through multiple means, particularly spam e-mails. When activated, DNSChanger modifies DNS settings so that legitimate URLs are redirected to malicious sites bent on stealing information and earning ad revenues for the scam artists. Since 2007, DNSChanger has infected over four million unsuspecting computers, both Mac- and Windows-based. A half million of those are estimated to have been infected in the U.S., and the total haul for DNSChanger is estimated at $14 million over the past four years – reason enough for the joint collaboration of the FBI, NASA, the Estonian Police and Border Patrol, and the National High Tech Crime Unit of the Dutch National Police Agency, to name a few of the involved partners.  The full list of parties responsible for the takedown can be found on the FBI’s official news release here.

DNSChanger and its Mac OSX variants – known as OSX.RSPlug.A, OSX/Puper, and OSX/Jahlav-C – prompted antivirus and antimalware developers to create tools to detect and remove its malevolent ass, but the malware continued to propagate, which is where Operation Ghost Click comes in. On November 8, two data centers – in New York and Chicago – were raided and more than a hundred command and control servers were taken offline. “To reduce the disruption to infected machines,” The Register reports, “the rogue DNS servers have been replaced with modified machines that are being operated for the next four months by the not-for-profit Internet Systems Consortium.”

Infected users should now be experiencing healthy DNS activity, even if the IP addresses of their systems have been compromised by DNSChanger. Users who wish to check if their systems have been compromised can use the FBI’s rogue DNS checker site. CNET also has some helpful information for Mac users who wish to manually check for DNSChanger infection.

Now for the fun part: simultaneous with the server shutdown, Estonian police took six individuals into custody.  According to The Register,

“Federal prosecutors in Manhattan said the scam was controlled by an Estonian company known as Rove Digital. Six Estonian nationals have been arrested by local authorities, and the federal prosecutors plan to seek the defendants’ extradition to the US. The defendants include Vladimir Tsastsin, 31; Timur Gerassimenko, 31; Dmitri Jegorov, 33; Valeri Aleksejev, 31; Konstantin Poltev, 28; and Anton Ivanov, 26. A seventh defendant, 31-year-old Russian national Andrey Taame, remains at large.”

Each defendant is charged with five counts of wire fraud and computer intrusion crimes, and Tsastisin faces an additional twenty-two counts of money laundering. If convicted, six of these geniuses are looking at 85 years. Tsastsin is looking at an additional ten years for each of the money laundering charges, which, if convicted on all counts, would make him 336 years old by the time he gets out – and they say that bad things don’t happen to bad people!

Some are calling it the biggest cyber-bust ever. Whether or not that’s true, it was still a pretty good day for the law enforcement and Internet security communities. Keep up the good work, and thanks for the early Christmas present!

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‘Operation Ghost Click’ Biggest Cyber-Bust Ever?

The purists may suggest that we should never have made things smaller. They might even postulate that the age of innocence is over, and they would probably be right; but a new age is just beginning, and the dinosaur-sized PC that sits on your desk is now just that: a dinosaur. The ‘Big Ol’ Beast,’ as I like to call mine, sits there and stares at me sometimes, seemingly pleading with me: “pay attention to me!” “Use me!” it begs. “Bigger is better!” it pouts.

I just chuckle and Swype my finger across a shimmering sheet of Gorilla Glass, giggling like a school girl when a word is transposed into the message I’m composing, without my finger ever leaving the virtual keyboard.  Holding a fully functional computer in the palm of my hand is surreal and downright unbelievable, especially when I think about my first computer, an Atari 400 with a flat membrane keyboard, 4 Kilobytes of RAM, and the ability to display a whopping 256 different colors onscreen simultaneously. The wonderment I felt while pounding out (literally – you had to press hard on those keys) games in Atari BASIC seems like only yesterday, but the tech world is a time machine and I’ve been transported into the 21st century – where smaller is better, and just when you thought it was safe to download that new Sudoku game for your shiny new mobile device, you should think again. For as our tech gets smaller, so too does the world we live in.

“Mr. Data – Engage”

Allow me to dispense with a formality: it is Android of which I speak. I’m not going to get into a lengthy debate here, but I’m dismissing the iPhone and iOS from this discussion. While there are many millions who would vehemently disagree with me, I believe the Android OS, and the phones that support it, to be vastly superior to Apple’s offerings – and it appears there are many millions who would agree with me. As a developer who strongly believes in sharing over hoarding, I’m an open-source guy and always have been.

The problem with open-source is that while it promotes the highly admirable philosophies of collaboration, sharing, and (often) freeness, it also sends a message to the lowlifes and scum of the earth. You know the types: those who will scam little old grandmothers out of their life savings. The despicable cross-section of society that often makes me ashamed to admit I’m part of that society. The scammers and spammers – the pond-scum phishermen, as I like to call them.

Security Breach

Herein lies part of the problem: society just can’t turn down something that’s free. If the Android OS has one significant problem, it’s that its open-source nature allows anybody to put free or advertising-supported content on the Android Market. It’s no secret that Google has had their share of problems with previously valid applications being reupped to the Market, replete with all sorts of security exploits. And while it seemed strange to me to install a firewall and antivirus software on my phone, in my mind it was a pure necessity and the first thing I did when I set up my phone. (Note: this is where I tip my hat to Apple’s closed, often oppressive, approach to its marketplace. Oppressive or not, I never sensed a security threat to my iPhone).

Spam Magnet

That device in your pocket is infinitely more dangerous than anything you ever plugged a keyboard and mouse into. The open-source feeling and the sense that you’re holding a teeny-tiny little PC in the palm of your hand provides a false sense of security, one that turns your phone into a spam magnet. It’s easy to forget, especially if you’re not an IT professional, that not all spam filters are created equal. Indeed, the very nature of mobile devices means we use them on the go, making that device in your pocket a spam attack waiting to happen.

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Bigger is Better: Why Your Pocket is Filled with Spammy Goodness

Recent activity indicates a significant reduction in spam levels, but no one should find comfort in this news. Spammers are making it personal, a new report from Cisco suggests, and at fault may be the law enforcement community for taking down the likes of Rustock and other botnets.

If email spam is a recurring nightmare from which you cannot seem to wake, read on. At the half year mark of 2011, some seemingly good news has poked its head over the horizon, with the promise of a brighter future. Unfortunately, the news isn’t all good; in fact, like spammers, it’s a little deceiving.

According to a new (June 2011) report published by Cisco Security Intelligence Operations (SIO) entitled “Email Attacks: This Time It’s Personal,” cybercriminals are dumping the ‘throw it against the wall and see if it sticks’ approach of indiscriminate spam, so much so that Cisco’s reports the, “annualized cybercrime business activity caused by mass, indiscriminate email attacks has declined by more than half.” The report goes on to state that the volume of overall random spam in the past year has declined by more than 80 percent, a figure that sounds a little on the high side, but no one can deny that spam volumes have dipped since the Rustock Botnet takedown in March.

Cisco SIO reports that the financial impact of this decline is significant.

“Cisco SIO estimates that the cybercriminal benefit resulting from traditional mass email-based attacks has declined more than 50 percent: from US$1.1 billion in June 2010 to $500 million in June 2011 on an annualized basis.”  

The direct impact of spam emails is even greater, down from 300 billion spam messages a day in June 2010 to 40 billion a day in June 2011.

Generally speaking, people continue to be smart enough to recognize a scam when they see one, but interestingly enough, those who aren’t are getting taken for more money. While Cisco SIO reports that the average user continues to be smart enough not to click that link, resulting in low user conversion rates (the amount of people who actually end up getting fleeced), that this figure “is partially offset by increases in the average user spending on conversions.” Cisco SIO attributes this increase in the spam artists using personalization tools, better-crafted scams and more effective malicious attacks, and reports that the level of personal information being divulged has resulted in larger paydays for the scammers.

So how much does an errant click cost? $250, according to the report. Cisco SIO explains the methodology used in arriving at this figure:

“This amount is in line with the low-end estimate of recent publicly disclosed scams and malicious attacks. For instance, in June 2011, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced a scam email directing recipients to send $350 to obtain a Clearance Certificate or else legal action would be taken against the recipient.”

Now for the bad news:  even though random email spam has experienced a large decline, the amount of money being made by the scammers has quadrupled. Using the estimates explained above, Cisco SIO reports that “scams and malicious attacks (as a sub-category of mass attacks) have grown from US$50 million to US$200 million over the last year on an annualized basis.”

Oh, the irony!

In what feels like a ‘why did they kick the hornets’ nest?’ moment, the Cisco SIO report explains how, in the past year, the face of global cybercrime has morphed into something different, and quite possibly, more dangerous.  “Starting in 2010 and continuing into 2011, the criminal ecosystem has been changing dramatically. Law enforcement authorities and security and industry organizations worldwide have been collaborating to shut down or limit the largest spam-sending botnets and their associates. SpamIt, a large spam-sending affiliate network, ceased operations in October 2010 after its database was leaked and Russian police pressed charges against its owner. Major botnets were severely curtailed or even shut down, including Rustock, Bredolab, and Mega-D.” The end result? “By disrupting the financial and technical business models of key cartels,” Cisco SIO reports, “threat volumes have declined in favor of more lucrative activities.”

Oh, the humanity! If what this report states is true (and it sure sounds about right), then by deposing the former ruler – the incessant glut of email-pushing online pharmacies, instant university degrees, Internet casinos, and secret fortunes waiting to be smuggled out of some foreign country – in its place the law enforcement community has established a new despot: the smarter, more focused scammer!

Evolutionary Change and Survival of the Craftiest

In fact, Cisco SIO reports:

“as part of the evolution of the criminal ecosystem, [the growing number of scams and malicious] attacks are becoming highly focused.”

Scammers are taking greater care in their approach as they carry out schemes designed to rob people of their hard-earned Benjamins. They’re taking to other means – such as SMS, social media like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, the tried-and-true telephone scam, and even  eBook readers – and they “are choosing their targets with greater care, using personalized information such as a user’s geographical location or job position.” Examples of these scams, Cisco SIO reports, are:

• SMS financial fraud scams to specific locales
• Email campaigns that use URL shortening services
• Social media scams, where the criminal befriends a user or group of users for financial gain

Spearphishing is on the rise and has experienced its own evolution, Cisco SIO states:

“Spearphishing attacks are aimed at a specific profile of users, often high-ranking organizational users who have access to commercial bank accounts. Spearphishing attacks are typically well crafted; they use contextual information to make users believe they are interacting with legitimate content.”

If the cyber scammers are getting smarter, then it’s imperative that we, too, evolve. Cyber criminals made $150 million this year from spear phishing, according to Cisco, and that kind of return on investment speaks for itself. Spam won’t go away, ever. But like a nasty super virus that evolves and mutates into an antibiotic-resistant strain, spam marches on, even if it’s only to the beat of a new drum.

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Spam Reduced, Targeted Attacks on the Rise: Cisco

In the most recent spam scam to assault Facebook, users are being greeted with a message advising them to ‘verify’ their account, seemingly a noble act of spam prevention and surely not spam itself, right? Not so fast. Those rascally little hackers have swapped out the ‘Like – Comment – Share’ links with a ‘== VERIFY MY ACCOUNT ==’ link, making clicking eminently attractive and practically unavoidable for the uninformed user. Clicking the link, of course, has exactly the opposite effect advertised by the malware, not only posting the message on the user’s wall, but in fact spreading JavaScript that, according to The Register, is “highly obfuscated.” (If interested, you can check out an interesting analysis of the script here.)

“Facebook has become a veritable cesspool of spam, with fake links promising to show users things like how many people have visited your profile or the never-released photos of Osama bin Laden’s body,” reports the Detroit Free Press.

In fact, it seems that these clickjacking schemes have become the norm and Facebook, by its own admission, has only been able to react to the scams as they appear.

“We’ve been shutting down the scammy pages that are the source of this spam as soon as we detect them or they’re reported to us,” Facebook’s Fred Wolens told the Free Press.

So let’s return to the kingdom of the blind. No disrespect to any Facebook user intended, but knowing how to recognize a genuine security threat often requires three things: experience, specialized understanding in what goes on under the hood, and the requisite savvy that comes with being an IT professional. The first one is easy. Think about the first time you learned that touching an open flame wasn’t such a good idea. Anyone who’s been nailed at least once by a malicious link will testify that they think twice before clicking again. The second and third, however, require specialized information that, simply speaking, aren’t part of the average computer user’s frame of reference. And to be fair to Facebook users everywhere, they shouldn’t need to have that specialized knowledge. It would be counterintuitive to the concept that Facebook is easy to join. Easy to use.

To give Facebook credit, last week the website announced several new features implemented to combat clickjacking:

• Web of Trust (WOT) – Web of Trust is a free service that grades sites based on user experience. Basically a community that relies upon reported links, WOT intercepts links in Facebook, warning the user that the link could be dangerous, if it has been frequently reported by the community.
• Clickjacking Prevention – Since clickjacking is based on tricking the user into thinking they’re clicking on one thing when in fact they’re clicking on another, Facebook has implemented extra security measures to detect whether links are trying to pretend they’re something else. In essence, users will be required to confirm their choices when they click “Like.”
• Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Protection – Malware often tricks users into pasting malicious code into the browser address bar. Facebook has added an extra layer of protection, providing a popup window advising the user that he or she is trying to address a bad link.
• Login Approvals – Facebook has added an optional – but highly recommended – layer of security by offering two-factor authentication, meaning that whenever a user tries to log on to Facebook from a new device, he or she will also have to enter a code sent via SMS to the user’s mobile device.

If you’re reading this and you have responsibility for office workers who have access to Facebook, you’re probably already copying and pasting into an enterprise-wide email. That would be a wise choice.

Let’s face the facts. Social networking does a great job of bringing people together in cyberspace. The problem: it also makes it way too easy to put hackers, spammers and cyberpunks together with innocent users who are not trained – or even interested in being trained – in how to recognize malicious code and spam when and where it appears. As memberships continue to grow in unprecedented proportions, hackers will continue to figure out how to exploit the system.

You had better hang on. The one-eyed men aren’t going away anytime soon. In fact, they’re fitting themselves for crowns.

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Facebook Spam Prevention Scam Propagates, Hackers Rejoice

Today, I want to look at some categories of spam where technologies for sieving them out are still less than perfect; or where it is exceedingly difficult for automatic filters to eliminate.  I also offer some simple suggestions on how you can identify such spam messages.

Spam to Scam you

I wrote specifically about scam spam in an article titled The Anatomy of a Scam Spam Message last week.  In that post, I identified various ways to identify emails from spammers that seek to scam their way to your money.  Among other factors, it is important to remember that such scammers are essentially working to swindle you of your hard-earned money, so it is imperative that no funds are sent regardless of their arguments.

Of course, most people don’t get swindled at the get-go, and a key technique of such scammers entails getting a conversation going first, which is then used to gradually establish a level of rapport and trust.  In fact, any initial contact is likely to start off with a seemingly harmless information request, which in itself can result in identity theft.  The best defense against scam spam would be to completely ignore them.  Forget about the stash of tens of million in gold ingots, or the imaginary “email lottery” that you’ve just won; if even a fraction of these emails I’ve received over the years are true, I’ll be a multi-billionaire by now.

Social Networking Spam

Ask about social networking spam a few years ago, and everyone – including spam administrators would have given you a blank look.  Today, the spectra of spam spread via social networking networks is actually something that most folks would have already encountered, whether they realize it or not.  The simplest types of social networking spam would be direct messages sent from Facebook accounts, though a variant I’ve spotted exploited the Facebook invitation system to deliver an unsolicited message.  Another ingenious method involved tagging your Twitter username to a tweet so that it appears in your @mention timeline.

Other than forcing a message upon you, more subliminal forms of social networking spam might revolve around a product endorsement or placement of affiliate links hidden via shortened URLs.  It might be argued that social networking spam is nowhere as prevalent as traditional email spam, as it is also relatively difficulty to mass send.

However, the complete inability of current technologies to detect and eliminate this category of spam means that the threat is even more acute.  Also, users tend to place a disproportionate amount of trust upon folks from within our network – regardless of the circumstances in which the befriending occurred.  For now, the best defense against social networking spam would be to exercise caution when adding new contacts to your network.  In fact, I only add people that I know personally – and whose profile picture matches.

Spam to spread Malware

Like it or not, spam is increasingly being used to spread malware.  In fact, a recent report on eWeek noted that spam actually declined in 2010, while security-related threats have increased both in sophistication and complexity.  Because actual delivery methods can vary widely, it is important to note that malware-related spam operates via two main vectors: either by tricking you to visit a malware-laced website or to have you download and execute a Trojan.

I personally exercise extreme caution over links sent to me via emails, and usually only launch them by manually typing the URL directly into my browser.  What about shortened URLs?  I usually do not entertain shortened links unless posted on Twitter by people I know and trust, since there are few reasons to use them elsewhere.  And where defending against malware-laced websites is concerned, it helps if administrators ensure that their company is using a modern web browser that is regularly updated and patched. Protecting against the latter is easier; I simply refuse to execute files that originate from dubious sources, including emails.

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The Changing Face of Spam and How to Protect Yourself from Them

If you or any of your employees get such a call, hang up immediately. Should someone in your company fall for the scam, take the infected computer off your network and off the internet completely until it can be cleaned out. An even better idea would be to keep computers containing sensitive data such as financials and employee info isolated from the network and internet in the first place. If it’s not connected it can’t be infected very easily.

Microsoft says they are aware of the calls and are investigating.

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Phone Scam Adds Computers to Botnet

Security experts say the flood of spam messages will continue to rise sharply as the World Cup continues and advises all fans to be extremely careful about what they click on.

The World Cup isn’t the only event being exploited by spammers. Malicious spam messages related to actor Gary Coleman’s tragic death, the disaster in the Gulf, and the World Expo in Shanghai have also been spotted. Exploiting headlines and scandals is one of the oldest and most popular tricks in spammer’s books and that’s because of one simple reason. It works.  There are still enough people falling for the fake emails to make it profitable, and that is the keyword. As long as a scam technique is profitable enough, it will continue to be used over and over again.

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World Cup Spam On the Rise

Starting a few weeks ago, credit unions around the country began receiving a set of CDs in the mail along with a letter that claimed to be from the National Credit Union Administration. It was a fake fraud alert that urged the recipient to review the documents on the CDs, claiming they were training materials, and was riddled with poor spelling and grammar:

“The NCUA has warned numerous times about “phishing” scams in which crooks send e-mails claiming to be from legitimate financial institutions, companies or government agencies asking consumers to “re-submit” or “verify” confidential information such as bank accounts, Social Security Numbers, passwords, and personal identification numbers…

Please read the included document, as it contains important training and informational material regarding the risks of fraud…”

The NCUA immediately issued an alert warning credit unions not to run the CDs as they may cause a security breach. It’s not yet known exactly what was on the CDs but according to Microsolved it was simply a test to gauge how many employees would fall for the scam and run the CDs. So far there have been no reports of any breaches or harm caused by the mailing.

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Malware Mailing May Have Been a Test

There has been very little news about the Twitter spam attack other than the one notice on Mashable, which has been circulated far and wide. Twitter’s own blog hasn’t said anything about it–but then again, the past day, Twitter has been hard to find, since it got hit by a denial-of-service attack yesterday and the site went down. There may be no connection between the denial-of-service attack and the wave of spam–Twitter is after all, what you might call an “attractive nuisance” that attracts all kinds of evil-doers.

Given these recent attacks, one asks should Twitter be allowed in the workplace? There’s no clear answer, except for “it depends.” Marketing people use it to good advantage to keep partners and customers informed. But one thing’s clear, workers need to be informed of the potential risks. Already, there have been many cases of malicious Twitter spam that contains links to nasty web sites that contain malware that could infect the computer or the entire network. Follow Twitter links at your own risk. This is especially dangerous as Twitter uses the abbreviated URLs, making it difficult to tell whether you’re being sent to a legitimate site.

This isn’t the first time compromised Twitter accounts have been used to send out spam. Just a few months ago in March, 750 accounts were hijacked to send links to porn sites.  And the spammers are on top of Twitter, and they’re apparently promoting its use at “Spam University,” or wherever it is they go to learn their trade. There are already commercial Twitter spamming tools out that can generate bogus Twitter accounts automatically for sending out ads.

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Twitter hit by spam wave

The web site containing the form then asks the victim to mail a printed copy of the form to an address. The print-and-send is just a ruse though, the data is actually captured through a hack when the victim presses the “print” button. The email, like many such scams, attempts to create a sense of false security, by claiming the print-and-send routine is being done for the victim’s safety.

Officials still have not been able to trace the source of the fraudulent email sender, who is using a bot network to send the emails. The ATO recommends that people delete emails like this immediately, and advises that they do not ask people to provide personal information by email. The same holds true for most, if not all, tax collecting agencies in other countries.

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Phishing Down Under

          “Nearly every college and university in the United States was impacted by this scheme,” Matt Whitworth, acting U.S. attorney for the Western District of Missouri, said in a statement. “Illegal hacking and e-mail spamming wreaks havoc on computer networks. These schools spent significant funds to repair the damage and to implement costly preventive measures to defend themselves against future intrusions.”

The operation allegedly netted over $4.1 million. The Shah’s and their company face 26 charges of aiding and abetting each other to access a protected computer without authorization and transmit commercial emails with the intent to deceive or mislead the recipients about the origin of the messages, as well as with conspiracy to engage in an unlawful spam operation and multiple charges of fraud using computers and email. They face a minimum of 10 years in jail as well as stiff fines.

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Grand Jury Indicts 4 In Huge College Spam Ring

Many of the URLs are unusual, often with several numbers and from Polish domains. When the searcher clicks on the link, they go to a web page where they become a victim of a drive-by download, which is designed to cause the victim’s computer to generate pop-up ads and issue a security warning. The warning tells the victim they have a virus, and must purchase a security program.

The combination of Polish domains and automotive results is what caught my eye on this issue. Curious Polish domains concerning automotive care are no stranger to me. A Google search on my name will serve up hundreds of articles and links to my books, as well as links to Polish web sites that talk about automotive repair. But, in my case, it’s not scareware, it’s just because my last name is strikingly similar to the Polish word used for an auto body repair shop. 

But aside from that curiosity, the bogus URLs are a real threat, and one of the only web site spam attacks out there that actually target a specific brand. So if you’re looking for a part for an old Ford Galaxie, and you see a link from a Polish domain, it can be one of two things. It may really be someone in Poland that has a legitimate web site to sell car parts. You may even be directed to a “blacharstwo,” or an auto body repair shop. Maybe one of my relatives. But more than likely, it’s part of a scareware scam.

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Spammers gaming Google, beware of strange Polish domains in search results

          To carry out the elaborate scheme, prosecutors in New York said on Friday, the man, identified as Paul Gabriel Amos, 37, a Nigerian citizen who lived in Singapore, worked with others to create official-looking documents that instructed Citibank to wire the money in two dozen transactions to accounts that Mr. Amos and the others controlled around the world.

The money came from a Citibank account in New York held by the National Bank of Ethiopia, that country’s central bank. Prosecutors said the conspirators, contacted by Citibank to verify the transactions, posed as Ethiopian bank officials and approved the transfers.

Amos and his crew would have gotten away with it too, had they not unwittingly directed the bank to wire the funds to what turned out to be invalid accounts. Those banks returned the money to Citibank because they could not process the transactions, and thus the scam was revealed. Simply amazing that Citibank could be scammed so easily. They’ve since credited the National Bank of Ethopia and pledge to improve their security procedures so it doesn’t happen again.

Amos, who lives in Singapore but was arrested while trying to enter the U.S. in Los Angeles, pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit bank fraud and wire fraud. Officials say he is hoping to make a plea deal with prosecutors.

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Citibank Falls for Nigerian Scam

According to security expert Bill Mullins, in the last year, email inboxes have being swamped with similar scamming emails from fraudulent sites like Greetings.com, and 2000Greetings.com, amongst others.

This time around, the domain name being used by these scammers is Greetingcard.org, which is a legitimate site of The Greeting Card Association, a greeting card industry trade association. This organization makes no bones about it when it says on its website, “We do not publish cards, nor do we have an e-card pick up. If you receive an e-card notification from our association, it is fraudulent and should be deleted”.

Bill goes on to further explain that this type of socially engineered email scam is based on playing the human curiosity card. This scam exploits the fact that people are naturally pretty curious. The surprise factor appeals to people to further make them want to open one of these dangerous scam emails. Receiving good news feeds into the “wow” factor that heightens the effect of making people want to open these bogus email greeting cards. Spammers are counting on all these different factors to lure people into the trap. Many people fall for it with disasterous results being unleashed on desktop computers or company networks.

In this scam, the body text of the message urges a person to click on an embedded link so that you can see the greeting card. However, clicking on this link will lead to malware being installed on your computer.

According to The Greeting Card Association, a legitimate e-card notification will always include the full name or personal email address of the sender. Furthermore, the sender will never be identified by a generic term such as a “friend” or “associate”, terms that are frequently used in fraudulent e-card scams.

Pass this information on to your email user community before the holidays get into full swing for sending more electronic greeting cards.

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Fake Greeting Card Emails Resurface

The Trojan works by waiting for the user to enter the URL for a banking or credit card site. Once it senses one, it replaces it with a fake one that captures the user’s details. So far it’s known to have the ability to sense nearly 3,000 different URLs, and is not detected by most anti-virus programs. It does this by using a rootkit to infect a PC’s master boot record, making it practically invisible.

Not surprisingly, security experts believe the criminals running the malware are in Russia, since that is the only company no infections have been detected in. They’ve made banks, credit card companies and law enforcement aware of the situation, but don’t rely on them to protect you. Use your common sense. Never click on a link in an email from any financial institution you do business with, and remember they will never, ever ask you for your password, account number, or any other personal info via email. Also be wary of emails offering links to videos of news stories, celebs, or anything else. Most of the time clicking on them will take you to a malicious site.

If you think you’ve been the victim of this Trojan, contact your bank or credit card company right away, and disconnect your system from the internet and any internal networks until you’ve cleaned out any infections.

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Trojan Compromises Over 300,000 Accounts

MillerSmiles.co.uk was originally founded in February of 2003 by Mat Bright. His intention was to use the site to sell and promote his love of Book Collecting, but when becoming involved in using eBay, he found that buying and selling online had many dangers. The biggest of these was the threat from spoof email and phishing scams, and users of eBay seemed to be the main targets.

Appalled at the lack of insight for internet users about this kind of identity theft and fraud, Mat set about posting snapshots of the emails and bogus web pages on the site with the intention of building awareness. What followed was a surprise…

Mat began receiving copies of other spoof eBay emails from fellow internet users who came across his site. He decided to expand and develop the site into an awareness building tool and a weapon against the perpetrators of these crimes. Having a security professional background he was up to the task, and set about logging reports of the spoof emails he received daily.

In late 2003, Tam Digital took over the running of millersmiles.co.uk with a view to developing the spoof email and phishing scam section of the site. This they did, and the site and its archive of reports continued to grow rapidly.

Then in early 2004 the site changed hands again, and Oxford Information Services Ltd stepped into the fold. They continue to run the site to this day, maintaining an ever-expanding archive of scam reports dating back over two years.

In February 2004, millersmiles.co.uk launched the world’s first scam alert service using an RSS news feed. RSS is a growing technology with rapidly increasing numbers of users. You can now include RSS news feeds in your Yahoo page for instance, and all of the major sites on the web now have a news feed of some sort, (including Yahoo, CNet , CNN and the BBC).

The scam alert news feed can also be used by webmasters within their own web pages and many sites have taken the opportunity to help millersmiles.co.uk build awareness and bring the growing problem of identity theft using spoof emails and bogus web content to the forefront of surfers’ experience.

millersmiles.co.uk continues to stand out as the prime international source of information about spoof emails and phishing scams, with a vast library of real examples including details and images of the emails themselves and related bogus web content.

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MillerSmiles.co.uk Provides Latest Anti-Phishing Updates

French president Nicolas Sarkozy is a victim of a phishing scam. French officials confirmed yesterday that he had money stolen from his bank account after inadvertently giving scammers his username and password through what was later found to be a phishing email.

           “[This] proves the system of Internet checking is not infallible,” French secretary of state for consumer affairs Luc Chatel said. “These cases are sufficiently rare that we haven’t had to really organize ourselves, but [are] sufficiently serious for us to reflect on how to improve the system.”

President Sarkozy filed a complaint with police and an investigation is ongoing. The specifics of the attack haven’t been released and officials say the president’s bank could face sanctions if it’s found their security procedures, or lack thereof, contributed to the hacker’s attack. 

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French President Falls for Phishing Scam