Items tagged with Phishing
Twitter needs to get a handle on its Promoted Tweets feature and it needs to do it quickly. The problem has to do with vetting, or lack thereof. We don't know how widespread the problem is, but there is at least one Promoted Tweet going around that is nothing more than a phishing scam preying on the desire of Twitter...
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There are many different ways of hacking into a person's email account. Some are rather sophisticated and involve a lot of effort, while on the end of the spectrum a scheme known as phishing is one of the easiest methods—all you need is a cooperative victim with limited technical savvy. Hackers found both in John...
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We talk a lot about the importance of businesses beefing up security to protect from the threat of those who might want to gain access to internal networks. Last week, we were given another great example of why: an integral piece of Linux software suffered a bug that at first seemed modest but turned out to be quite...
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Computer hackers accessed personally identifiable information and financial details belonging to around 1,400 University of Virginia workers as part of an email phishing scam, the University announced. An internal investigation determined that the culprits first accessed the stolen records in early November 2014 and...
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ICANN, a non-profit organization that is responsible for looking after the names and domains of the Internet, announced that it has suffered a serious phishing attack that compromised its data.
An investigation is underway, but ICANN believes that it was the victim of a “spear phishing” attack that was first...
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Another day, another exploit/attack/hack/breach/phishing scam to worry about. This one concerns Valve’s Steam Guard Protection and a new phishing scheme that, if successful, allows a cybercriminal to steal a file that will bypass the Steam Guard Protection and allow the thief to log in to the victim’s account from any computer....
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Symantec, which has been making antivirus products for decades (including Norton, the first piece of software most people would try to remove from a new PC), is getting out of the antivirus game, sort of. Brian Dye, Symantec's senior vice president for information security, told the Wall Street Journal that in...
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We live at a quizzical time in technology. The tech boom has revolutionized the world, and the innovations that are pouring out of brilliant minds are incredible in both their frequency and content. But there is also a backlash against a lot of technology, perhaps highlighted best by the curious rage that Google Glass...
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Kaspersky released its Safe Browser for Windows Phone, months after putting out the same product for iOS and days after making a similar one for Android. The app does exactly what you think it does, by blocking access to potentially dangerous sites with a warning page to protect against phishing attacks. Designed for both personal and corporate...
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Although news about Target’s huge data breach broke almost two months ago, the post-mortem has persisted, and a security firm has posted a detailed breakdown of what went wrong. The story is unnerving, to say the least, as it’s not so much about system-wide failures or anything so big as it is about how...
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According to security company Kaspersky Labs, hackers and cybercriminals are targeting gamers, with 11.7 million attacks on gamers in 2013 and some 4.6 million pieces of malware specifically designed to target them. Kaspersky says that’s about 34,000 attacks per day, on average. It’s perhaps not terribly...
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A study from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University examining the factors that cause people to be more susceptible to phishing attacks found strong correlations between gender, certain personality traits, and openness orientation to social networking and being more vulnerable to such an attack. The three...
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One of the worst possible things that could happen to Facebook would be if it became overrun with phishing scams. Users would start jumping ship in droves. Of course, Facebook users are certainly no strangers to phishing--they’ve seen everything from fake screens asking for your login credentials to baited “Hey bro, i’m in...
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The U.S. Air Force has awarded a $750,000 contract to Wombat Security Technologies for the creation of a "micro-game platform" that trains people not to fall for phishing schemes. Wombat is best known for anti-phishing training games with cartoon-like graphics and names like Anti-Phishing Phyllis, Anti-Phishing Phil, and PhishGuru. This is...
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It seems, sometimes, that a new phishing scam crops up every day, no matter how much security is improved.That's not just your imagination.IBM today released its annual IBM X-Force 2009 Trend and Risk Report, which showed threats that include phishing and document format vulnerabilities, among others, are on the...
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FBI Director Robert Mueller, while speaking at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on Wednesday, gave an example of why everyone should be wary of cybercrime. He related the story of the head of one of America's domestic agencies. This person, Mueller said, received an email, purportedly from his bank, which looked...
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Internet Explorer 8 is the safest web browser on the market, according to a pair of studies sponsored by, um, Microsoft.One study focused on socially engineered malware and the other on phishing.In the first study, NSS Labs found that IE8 caught 81 percent of live threats, while Firefox 3 caught 27 percent...
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It's not your imagination. You are getting more spam in your e-mail inbox.Symantec, which focuses on Internet security and storage, issued a report this week that said a stunning 90.4 percent of e-mail on corporate networks this month was unsolicited. That's a 5.1 percent jump over April.The report highlights:• Spam – 90.4% in May (an...
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Typical of any such crises, whether its the aftermath of an even such as an earthquake, or in this case, the swine flu, phishers and spammers are taking advantage of the situation. Symantec reports on spam that seems designed to simply gather email addresses and phone numbers for a future campaign perhaps. As shown above, one example contains...
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Googling your own name might not be such a narcissistic activity after all; in fact, it just must save you from identity theft. At least that's what Kevin Andreyo, a Wilkes University professor, discovered when he used the "deep web" search engine, Pipl, to see what information about him might be publicly available on the Internet. What he...
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TinyURL is a popular URL shortening service which is frequently used to reduce the length of a URL to something more manageable. Security firm Trend Micro has warned that TinyURL phishing, first reported in February, is becoming more popular and spreading across different languages. An example of tinyURL use would be perhaps a Mapquest link...
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It seems Google can’t catch a break. Just hours after Google’s Gmail service was hit by an outage that lasted several hours, Google Talk became the victim of a phishing scam. Users of the instant messaging service received a TinyURL link that appeared to be from friends on their buddy lists. When a user clicked the link, it would take him...
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