Tag: PHISHING

Phishing [Wikipedia] is nothing new. The bad guys have been spamming our inboxes for a long, long time hoping we'll click on some bogus link and provide them with important personal info like usernames, passwords, and credit card numbers. Attacks like this rarely limit themselves to one avenue. So where do the bad guys go to find victims when they're not busy spamming? Why, the world's number ...

Earlier this week, the folks over at Sunbelt noted that Twitter was working on a new feature. While there's nothing posted to blog.twitter.com about the development, it's no secret that their developers have started giving the bird to malicious links. As of now, Twitter's blocking powers are pretty limited. On a good note, the services appears to be tied in to Google's Safe Browsing service. ...

Phishers are up to the same old tricks, with a new target: your Twitter password. Several Twitter users received a direct message today that included a Blogspot link purporting to be about "a funny blog about you!" They clicked on it and found themselves redirected to a spoofed Twitter login page that grabs passwords and may use your account to propagate the phishing messages to more users. To ...

Welcome to Googleholic, your bi-weekly fix for everything Google! In this edition: Gmail fights PayPal and eBay phishers Protocol Buffers go open source Walking directions for Google Maps YouTube Screening Room, round two Viacom v. YouTube and what it means for your privacy ...

Have you ever accidentally visited MySpace? Yeah, we probably have too, though, it was never a noticeable problem. In fact, we can't even remember it happening, but it seems like it has to have happened... right? Well, this Firefox add-on promises to detect MySpace in Firefox, and provide a pop-up menu to stop unsuspecting web-browsers from hitting up the social network. The plug-in is ...

Despite the fact that phishing is already illegal, some senators felt that it needed to be made a little more illegal. A bill (PDF) introduced by three senators including, of "series of tubes" fame, Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens, seeks to outlaw phishing all over again, as well as make it illegal for people to mask or hide their private information if they own domain names. Specifically, if the bill ...

Face it, as a geek you get asked all the time to fix this, or reload that. We're always looking for ways to streamline that process, educate our family or friends and leave more time for ourselves to play World of Warcraft read. Michael Wales put together an excellent 6 step security briefing that even your mom can understand. Covering the basics like Phishing, Antivirus, Automatic Updates and ...

What's better than spam? How about seeing a man found guilty of operating a phishing scheme face 101 years in prison? A 45 year old man in California was recently found guilty of posing as AOL's billing department and tricking people into giving him their credit card information, by using hacked Earthlink accounts and fraudulent web pages. Under the glorious Can-Spam Act, this guy has been ...

Thought phishing was just a problem for banks and PayPal, did you? Well, it's entered a new territory: MySpace. And it's got some new tricks up its sleeve. MySpace's iconic Tom Anderson has made a post describing the new attacks that con users into divulging their MySpace username and password. What's interesting about the attacks is that, unlike most phishing sites that must exist on a site other ...

This week the folks behind OpenDNS launched PhishTank, a new database for tracking and defending against phishing sites. It's a pretty slick-looking site that allows you to submit suspected phishing sites, verify (or not) sites that other people have submitted. What really sets PhishTank apart, though, is that the database is totally open via a free API. This is intended to allow developers to ...

Brian Krebs of the Washington Post writes about how Banks and other financial institutions are stopping phishers by disallowing the use of their logo and website images via a white-listing technology for outgoing image links. This forces phishers to actually do some work if they want to duplicate the website, since the bank swaps the real images with a fraud warning image. The phishing site thinks ...

Both Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7, both in beta, are being positioned by their makers as the most secure web browsers for Windows, but which is really the best? ZDNet's Ed Bott has written an in-depth comparison of the two browsers' security features, which covers not only code vulnerabilities, but phishing and malware as well. Bott doesn't indicate a clear winner, instead concluding that ...

Every one of use uses DNS every time we connect to the internet, yet it's been decades since anyone has made any improvements to the end-user experience. In case you're scratching your head (or saying, "DNS? Isn't that the thing that happens when Internet Explorer can't connect?"), DNS is the system that, among other things, translates the addresses you type into your browser into the IP numbers ...