Aug 22
Friday, August 22nd, 2008
The allure of cyber crime lies in its promise of quick riches, much like that of the illegal drug trade. But building a network of hacked personal computers that can distribute your data-stealing malicious software is a time-consuming process that requires a modicum of skill. That is, until recently, when several online services have emerged that promise to help would-be cyber crooks graduate from common street dealers to distributors overnight. Such is the aim of services like “loads.cc,” which for a small fee will take whatever malware you provide and inject it into a pre-selected number of PCs already compromised and under the thumb of the service owners. Currently, loads.cc claims to have 264,552 hacked systems in more than a dozen countries that it can use as hosts for any malicious software that clients want to install. The latest details from the “statistics” page displayed for members says the […]
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Aug 22
Friday, August 22nd, 2008
Zombie farmer suspects sent to the pen
A Brazilian man who allegedly sold access to a huge network of compromised PCs has been charged with computer hacking offences in the US.…
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Aug 22
Friday, August 22nd, 2008
Address harvesting all too easy
Apple has inadvertently made it easy for spammers to create a database of MobileMe email addresses.…
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Jul 25
Friday, July 25th, 2008
The Web became a substantially more dangerous place this week, thanks largely to the publication of instructions that show cyber criminals how to exploit a pervasive, critical flaw in the Internet infrastructure. While Internet service providers and corporations can mitigate the danger by updating the software that powers vulnerable components of their networks, data released yesterday indicates that only about half of the world’s online population is currently protected by these updates. At issue is a basic design flaw in the domain name system. DNS is the communications standard that acts as a kind of telephone book for the Internet, translating human-friendly Web site names like example.com into numeric addresses that are easier for networking equipment to handle and route. When people type a Web site name into their Internet browser, the process of routing of that name to Internet address is generally handled through DNS servers managed by […]
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Jul 25
Friday, July 25th, 2008
Spam king Robert Soloway was sentenced this week to 47 months in prison for sending more than 90 million junk e-mail messages over a three month period. Meanwhile, federal authorities are searching for a spammer who walked away from a prison camp on Sunday. Soloway pleaded guilty in March to mail fraud, and tax evasion. A federal judge still must decide how much restitution he will pay. In other news, Edward “Eddie” Davidson, a 35-year-old stock spammer who was sentenced in April to 21 months in prison, escaped from a prison camp in Florence, Colo., this week. According to this Associated Press story, Davidson was last seen roughly 90 miles north of the camp in the Denver suburb of Lakewood.
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