scam Most Recent Posts

Over the holidays, my Facebook page was hacked and a phishing attack was launched using the "chat" feature, where my friends were contacted and told my wife and I had been mugged and that we needed money. It just goes to show that even with an alphanumeric password, your account information is not safe.

A bogus tool to create fake Amazon Marketplace receipts is doing the rounds. There are fears that such fake receipts could fool unwary vendors. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers wonder if this is really news. Not to mention História Do Natal Digital...
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IT chief pilot fish at this financial services company gets an e-mail forwarded by the CEO -- and the big boss is very worried, because it looks to him like someone has done lots of research in order to scam his company.

In today's podcast: James Gosling, Java creator, quits Oracle; Adobe execs tells Apple to perform an anatomically impossible act; Ikea imposters scam 40,000 Facebook users.

This week on Security Levity, how some Internet users are fighting back against scam artists. This is a followup to two of my previous blog posts: about Nigerian 419 scams and Chinese domain registration fraud.

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Welcome back, your humble blogwatcher missed you. To bring you up to date, here's a quick pick of stories you may have missed. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers offer around the turkey sandwiches, eschewing bogus talk of Cyber Monday. Not to mention Bill Gates taking a support call...

This week on Security Levity... the second in a series of posts about spam in different cultures. This time: Nigeria, home of the 419 scam. We've all received advance-fee fraud come-ons: typically, badly-worded invitations to help a bank teller "liberate" money from a forgotten bank account. The basic idea is to gradually draw you into a web of lies, play on your greedy appetite for easy money, and then hit you for some "expenses"... or worse.

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I’ll take a good laugh whenever it comes my way, especially these days. When my friend Vinny told me about the 419eater.com website I immediately knew it had the potential to offer up some good guffaws. And boy did it.

Did you flunk out of 8th grade? Do you have barely contained aggressive tendencies and no scruples? Then, my friend, you may have a career in the Brooklyn camera store industry. But hopefully not for long. The chickens are finally coming home to roost for one of the most notorious bait-and-switch scams on the Net.

I don’t remember hearing about this over the summer, but apparently, an airline-ticket email scam seen just last July is back. In this spam attack, the recipient receives a bogus email that looks like it originates from an airline (in this case, Continental Airlines).

The new breed of identity thieves aren't just after your money. They want your health insurance.

Looks like phishers are still at it, only now the targets are executives and they're being lured with "promise" of a subpoena. The problem is that once they follow the provided link in the email message, they're not really being directed to a federal court site, although the name "uscourts.com" may lead them to believe otherwise (perhaps because there really is a "uscourts.gov").  They're brought to a site where they're instructed to download a plug-in so that they'll be able to read their subpoena. Unfortunately, in reality the plug-in is malware.

Security managers can protect their enterprises against a lot of things, except stupidity.

Take the episode at Eden Prairie, Minn.-based grocery giant Supervalu Inc. Earlier this year, someone sent the company two e-mails -- one purporting to be from an employee at Frito-Lay and the other from an employee at American Greetings Corp. The late-February e-mails basically instructed Supervalu to start depositing future payments to each vendor into new bank accounts, one in Miami and the other in Rogers, Ark..