Internet Threats Blog
By now many of you have read about security site Sophos recently released post on Facebook’s report on compromised accounts. According to the released infographic, 0.06% of the 1 billion logins per day are compromised. It does not sound like a threatening number until you realize we are still talking about roughly 600,000 accounts a day. Facebook’s report also indicated that less than 4% of … [Read more...]
Over the past few weeks we have seen a spike in the posting of fake online employment listings. The positions claimed to be available have run the gamut, from administrative assistant, to stocker, to docker, and many more. The locations spanned across the U.S.A., from the Space Coast to San Francisco to Seattle, and on to Salem. One recent scam worked as follows: A number of fake job … [Read more...]
The first half of 2011 should prove to be the “year of the breaches”. We saw numerous security breaches targeting high-profile organizations such as, Sony PlayStation, Lockheed Martin, and a dozen of other companies and government organizations. Security breaches are on the rise and here to stay! Recently, Japan’s largest defense contractor Mitsubishi Heavy Industries suffered a massive … [Read more...]
Hacker groups Anonymous and LulzSec have been on the spotlight for the last couple of months. The media has had a feast reporting each and every one of their attacks; going after companies like PayPal and Sony to the CIA and the FBI. These two groups have established themselves as “hactivists” (a clever wording of hackers and activists) and have been bringing down sites for “the lulz” or … [Read more...]
Several posts have been written about the potential risks of Social Media and yet the statistics for malware attacks are on the rise. More than one million web sites were estimated to be infected by the end of Q4 2010 and the probability that an average Internet user would hit an infected page after three months of web browsing was 95% (Dasient, 2011). What makes these attacks more fructiferous … [Read more...]
Google AdWords users have been the target of the latest phishing attack. It all begins with an email from Google indicating that your Google AdWords campaign has stopped running. Cybercriminals prompt the user to log in to their “AdWords Account” through a phony site in order to phish sensitive login credentials – which most of the time also access other associated Google accounts (Gmail, … [Read more...]
Twitter users started reporting a phishing attack spreading through Direct Messages earlier this month. Various versions of the message were spreading fast through the site, members were receiving an email from another Twitter user and were told they were mentioned on a “funny blog post” or a video – a short link was attached. Clicking on the link would take you to a realistic-looking … [Read more...]
Long gone are the days when shredding sensitive paper documents would suffice to protect your private information. Identity theft has surpassed credit card and utilities fraud to become the number one complaint by consumers in 2010. With the increase in popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, smartphone usage and other mobile devices, the amount of personal information … [Read more...]
Spam – it’s annoying, it fills up your inbox. It can be offensive and even harmful to your computer, it just plain sucks. I attended an Internet Hot Topic session earlier this year and the speaker gave spam the description as being similar to pornography using a US Supreme Court Justice’s quote regarding their take on spam: “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.” We … [Read more...]
I watched the recent disaster in Japan unfold with a more vested interest than some of the previous ecological tragedy's that have occurred in my lifetime. My father is Japanese, and by extension I and the rest of my father’s family are Japanese. I was also in the unfortunate position of having two friends who happened to be taking a vacation in Japan at the time of the tsunami. As the hours of … [Read more...]
