“In 2010, aggressive malware now executes in stealth mode, running in the background with an oblivious end-user, and antivirus software that can’t detect it.” Thus, in 24 words, reviewer Ben Rothke sums up why you should read Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who are Bringing Down the Internet, by Joseph [...]
Author Archive for Bryant
Inside a global cybercrime ring
Published by March 25th, 2010 in Adware, CyberCrime and Viruses. 0 CommentsA March 24, 2010 Reuters story headlined “Inside a global cybercrime ring” by reporter Jim Finkle leads with this paragraph: Hundreds of computer geeks, most of them students putting themselves through college, crammed into three floors of an office building in an industrial section of Ukraine’s capital Kiev, churning out code at a frenzied pace. [...]
Nashville Examiner reporter Brandon King reports on a recent study conducted by Javelin Strategy and Research, showing that 11.1 million adults were victims of identity theft in 2009.This represents a 12% increase from that of 2008 and up 37% from 2007. Quoting from King’s article: “The odds have never been higher for becoming a fraud [...]
Cyber crime: a clear and present danger
Published by February 16th, 2010 in CyberCrime, Data Theft and Small Business Security. 0 CommentsI’ve just been reading a new report on cyber crime, published by Deloitte, the major international accounting firm. I’m in the business of protecting individuals and small business owners from cyber crime, and this whitepaper provides an important update on this incredibly dangerous phenomenon. The 16-page document is titled, “Cyber Crime: A Clear and Present [...]
It’s news when an identity thief is caught (only 1 thief in 700 reported cases is caught and prosecuted), but when the victim catches her own thief, that commands a headline! In a byline article in the Seattle Times yesterday, Ian Ith reports the story of Michelle McCambridge, a 23-year-old retail clerk and college student [...]
News of a new virus, called “Facebook Fan Check Virus”, is sending a lot of people to Google to search for information, and those searches are leading them right into hacker traps. Click on one of those websites and the most likely result is that you’ll download scareware, an urgent notice that your PC has [...]
Bill would allow Obama to take over Internet
Published by September 3rd, 2009 in CyberCrime, CyberTerrorism and Uncategorized. 0 CommentsI’m in the business of cyber security, and I’m in favor of all the help we can get. But when a liberal Senator introduces legislation to fight cyber crime, my neck hairs stand up and vibrate. Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s Cybersecurity Act of 2009 raised a lot of hackles when it was first introduced because of [...]
A big tip of my hat to investigators and the U.S. Attorney who brought down Albert Gonzalez, the Miami hacker authorities were able to tie to a cyber-crimewave that hit companies from Heartland Payment Systems to Hannaford Brothers. The 28-year-old Gonzalez pled guilty to various charges and now faces up to 25 years in prison. [...]
Suddenly an ad appears on the webpage on your screen. You try to delete it, but nothing works. You go to another page. And another and another. The ad keeps following you. It’s the newest ransomware scam from Russian hackers. The Ransomware Trojan is either dropped onto systems already compromised by other strains of malware, [...]
Sometimes it seems that the dark side is leading in the development of new technology. Technical journals and reports abound with examples. Last week there was a reference to quality control services for malware makers in a report from Cisco. The report cited a Russian site that for a fee tests malicious files against the [...]