I received an email from an acquaintance this morning. It said: Please Urgent Needed Hello,   How are you doing?hope all is well, I"m sorry that i didn’t inform you about my traveling to England for a Seminar.I need a favor from you as soon as you receive this e-mail because i misplaced my wallet

The estimable Gadi Evron has posted an article at DarkReading about a dialogue he was caught up in on Facebook. One of his contacts popped up in a Facebook Chat window and told him how she’d been been held at gunpoint and robbed in London, losing her credit card, cash and mobile phone. Well, having

Responding to a request for information about phishing and malware distribution mechanisms this morning, I happened upon a link on the Anti-Phishing Working Group site to the Silver Tail blog  The site has been running a series of blogs on "Online Fraud from the Victim’s Perspective". Author Laura Mather tells the story of two victims,

Here’s something I haven’t noticed before (but then I don’t pay nearly as much attention to phishing messages as I used to, owing to the need to sleep occasionally). I’ve started to receive messages purporting to be from the Alliance and Leicester, in the UK. The messages are much the same, apart from the Subject

A new advisory from the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) offers advice to website owners on what actions to take when notified that their site or server has been compromised for use by phishers. At 18 pages, it’s a substantial high-level document, including: Some web site phishing attack and response scenarios Identifying an attack Reporting a

A memo to Middle- East Asia Promotion. Thank you for letting me know that I’ve won $720,000.00 in a promotion sponsored by Dell and the Emirates Foundation. Four days running: nothing suspicious about that, nor the fact that my wife has apparently won the same amount in the same promotion every day for the past

An IT/business magazine called Information Age, apparently aimed at executives with interest and responsibilities in IT, hit my letterbox this morning. That’s an actual magazine with real paper pages: remember those? Seeing as it’s Saturday, I took it back to bed with me to look through while I had the first coffee of the day, and

MSNBC put up some interesting comment on the Heartland security breach. Since they’ve put some emphasis on the involvement of malware in the breach, it’s worth making a few points. * Heartland was PCI compliant when the breach occurred. The PCI DSS v1.2 Requirement #5.1.1 states: “Ensure that all anti-virus programs are capable of detecting,

…no promise of chicks for free, but I did get spam this morning offering me a "Free-Trial kit" for some scheme for "making money through the Internet by doing almost nothing" (probably some sort of pyramid scheme, I guess, updated with a reference to using Google). While I’m not about to take up the offer, I

The election may be over, but the bad guys are still milking it, and there are lessons to be learned. I guess there’s nothing that brings out the worst in human nature like an election. There were all those chain letters, rumours and hoaxes about how various candidates were undesirable, un-American, immoral etc.  Then there were