Posts tagged cyber crime
Cyber criminals get more aggressive with social engineering tactics
Oct 12th
by Matt Sergeant
Cyber criminals are more aggressive with their social engineering tactics as evidenced in the September 2011 Symantec Intelligence Report. This month, roughly 72 per cent of all e-mail-borne malware contained aggressive variants of generic polymorphic malware, compared with 23.7 per cent in July and 18.5 per cent in August.
Attackers are exploiting the weaknesses of traditional security preventions by using a variety of strategies to trick users. Read the rest of this entry »
Sophisticated polymorphic malware is on the rise
Aug 3rd
By Paul Wood
Recent research from the July 2011 Symantec Intelligence Report found cyber criminals are more aggressive than ever before when it comes to spreading malware over e-mail using more sophisticated polymorphic techniques designed to bypass more traditional anti-virus defences.
Paul Wood
Polymorphic malware uses variations of the same code by employing different encoding techniques, making it harder to detect as each new variation may require its own signature in order to identify it correctly. Read the rest of this entry »
Spammers abusing domain parking services on a massive scale
Jun 7th
By Nick Johnston
Domain parking, the act of registering an Internet domain name without placing any content on the website, is a common practice for a business website in the pre-launch stage.
These landing pages are familiar to us all, often reading “Coming Soon” or “Under Construction.” However, domain parking can also be used for less than noble reasons.
Cyber squatting, registering a domain and reselling it to a company who owns a trademark within the name, and monetized domain parking, where advertisements are displayed for revenue, are also prevalent. Read the rest of this entry »
Chinese hackers: the root of all evil, or an obvious scapegoat?
Apr 8th
By Claudiu Popa
The Chinese are apparently after our law firms now. They weren’t content to hack Google and the Pentagon. After those hacking attempts on our federal government’s Finance and Treasury Board (considered to have been two of the most secure) departments, denied any wrongdoing.
Claudiu Popa
And now they’ve set their sights on a notoriously low tech industry. But of course, their government vehemently denies it. The nerve! Read the rest of this entry »
World Cup-related scams
Jul 8th
Buying a fake World Cup ticket isn’t the only scam that awaits the unwary footie fan online. As the tournament in South Africa reaches its climax and excitement mounts in the lead up to the final, fraudsters are continuing to augment their attacks with a variety of World Cup-related email ruses. Supporters will need a sharp defensive line-up to keep them out.
Paul Wood
Despite FIFA’s stringent rules about distribution and resale, there are still World Cup tickets on offer from unauthorized online outlets. Some of these will be old-fashioned touts using new channels to sell tickets at higher than face value. Some will be genuine people who bought tickets and now can’t go, but are unaware of the resale rules (which state that tickets can only be transferred to another named person with FIFA’s permission). And some will be outright fraudulent: the tickets are forgeries or don’t exist at all.
The end result for the ardent fan is the same: they risk flying themselves to South Africa at great expense only to find they are refused permission to the stadium. Read the rest of this entry »
Business is booming in Canada’s riskiest online city
Mar 23rd
Location, location, location.
If homeowners and businesses were to take a cue from the Norton Top 10 Riskiest Online Canadian Cities Report, Burlington might well be ghost town in a couple of months.
The report, the first of its kind by the security software company, names the South Ontario municipality as the overall Canadian champion of its spam and online fraud hot bed award. The city was followed closely by Port Coquitlam and the Township of Langley, both in British Columbia. (Toronto, don’t feel so bad you also made it – to eight place right next to Markham.)
So what are businesses to do if they’re on Norton’s risky city lists? Cut the Internet connection? Close the online shop? Move to a new location? Read the rest of this entry »
Free anti-spam and malware tool for Facebook
Jan 22nd
Are you getting tired of clearing out all those spam messages from your blogsite’s comment section?
You’re not alone. A recent survey released by online security software company Websense Inc. says that nearly 95 per cent of user generated comments to blogs, chat rooms, message boards and other social net content are actually spam or links to malware.
If you’re engaged in any form of social networking activity to boost your professional or personal profile or if Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, BlogSpot or other such sites part of your company’s marketing campaign, that’s bad news.
Websense, however, has recently released a beta version 2.0 of its Defensio social Web threat detection platform. Read the rest of this entry »
Holiday fear mongering! Will Anyone Survive 2010?
Dec 24th
Since my previous blog post I read a ridiculous number of security projections for 2010. These range from catastrophic scenarios to something much, much worse. To these I say, bah humbug!
It seems that Christmas is the time of year when many security professionals find it acceptable to drop their responsible approach to informing the world about emerging trends in favour of much more alarmist ways to spread the word about their worst nightmares.
