Internet Security and Programming

If there is any truth to the old saying that there is no honor among thieves then it is doubly true for thieves who transact with one another yet never actually meet face-to-face. Perhaps that explains the popularity of certain services in the underground cyber crime economy that make it easy for crooks to purchase stolen credit and bank accounts in bulk and check whether the accounts are legitimate and active. From the many hours Security Fix spent skulking around some of the more active cyber crime communities online recently, I saw a site called sh0pp0rtal.net mentioned quite a bit. I managed to acquire an account on this exclusive service, and found some 78,628 individual MasterCard and Visa credit and debit accounts for sale at various prices there. As one can see from the screen shot to the left, users can select cards that come from victims in particular cities,

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These days, nearly every aspect of the underground online economy that supports commercial crime operations has been automated. Online forums and criminal social networking sites have long offered aspiring newbies tips on getting started. But a slew of extremely popular Web sites increasingly are making it possible for newcomers to begin reaping profits from their activities through point-and-click Web interfaces that even the most novice hackers can navigate. What follows today and throughout the rest of the week is a look at some trends and tools Security Fix observed being used by cyber crooks, as a result of several months of lurking on some of the more popular (and in some cases invite-only) cyber criminal forums. Even the greenest cyber crook knows you never use your own Internet connection to conduct business. In the past, masking your true Internet address online meant configuring your browser to use multiple “open […]

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G’day to added anti-spyware
Security and storage giant Symantec has agreed to buy specialist Australian-based anti-spyware firm PC Tools. Terms of the deal were undisclosed in Monday’s announcement.…

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Holy warez, Batman
Zango affiliates are offering gateway access to pirated films, including the Hollywood blockbuster The Dark Knight, in a bid to induce users into accepting adware.…

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At the end of the Black Hat hacker convention in Las Vegas a week ago Thursday, I had a few minutes to sit down with James Finch, head of the FBI’s Cyber Division. What follows is an excerpted Q&A from that discussion, in which Finch describes himself as a serious geek who refuses to be spooked by organized cyber criminal gangs that target online banking customers and other ‘Netizens. Q: I see you’ve got a nice MacBook Pro there. Are you a pure Mac user? A: No, I am not. I raised my daughters on Windows machines, but my 4-year-old son, I’m raising him on a Mac. I just bought him an iMac. I prefer flavors of Unix over Windows. Q: Which flavors? A: Well, I’m running SUSE, Fedora 9. I don’t spend as much quality time with these operating systems as I used to. Q: So what does the

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