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budnonymous


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Hackers poised for Black Friday assault
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Hackers poised for Black Friday assault


Holiday shoppers will fall prey to Web-based attacks, experts say

By Jon Brodkin, Network World, 11/19/07

You know retailers are ready for Black Friday but so are hackers poised to launch a slew of Web-based attacks against consumers. Your money and personal information could be at risk.


The holiday season in general is a huge time for hackers [and] Black Friday is typically the start, says Paul Henry, vice president of strategic accounts for Secure Computing. This year, my biggest concern for consumers is all the Web-borne malware out there.

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Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, is followed in marketing lingo by Cyber Monday. Both are big days for retailers and online fraudsters. Consumers should watch out for e-mails advertising incredible deals that seem too good to be true.

Freebies may be freebies in the sense that you get free malware, says Jamz Yaneza, a senior threat researcher at Trend Micro.

A common scam is to pick the hot toy of the season and send out a spam e-mail blast offering it for much less than the typical price, Henry says. Victims end up entering credit card information on malicious sites designed to look like well-known, trusted ones. They might also unknowingly download a keylogger that can steal personal information people type in when making any kind of Internet transaction.

Be leery of sites being advertised [in e-mail that might be spam]. In all likelihood youre being directed to a malware-connected site, Henry says. Do not click on URLs within e-mails even for well-known public sites.

In an HTML e-mail, its a trivial task for hackers to hide the real URL a victim is clicking on.

It might say ebay.com, but youre actually clicking on something entirely different, Henry says.

Online fraudsters have been busy this year. Fraud losses related to U.S. e-commerce will top $3.6 billion in 2007, up 20% from last year, according to a report by the vendor CyberSource this month. The increase in dollar loss is due mostly to growing e-commerce sales, as the percentage of transactions that are fraudulent has held steady.

The run-up to Christmas and tax filing season are the two most dangerous times of the year for online shoppers, Yaneza says. Continued



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BARRACUDA NETWORKS REPORTS THANKSGIVING DAY PHISHING SURGE AS SCAMMERS RUSH TO CASH IN ON BLACK FRI

  by Daniela Boers   
26-11-2007
Thousands of New Phishing Web Sites Appear in 24-hour Period as Scammers Work Overtime to Take Advantage of Four-Day U.S. Holiday Weekend


Barracuda Networks, Inc., the worldwide leader in email and Web security appliances, reported a more than 10x surge in the number of phishing Web sites created and three times the number of phishing emails sent out in the last 24 hours. This increase in activity indicates that scammers and their criminal networks are working feverishly to cash in on Black Friday,' traditionally the biggest shopping day of the year, and the long Thanksgiving Day weekend.

Barracuda Central, a 24/7 security operations center at Barracuda Networks that continuously monitors the latest spam, virus and other Internet threats including phishing Web sites, observed a tremendous increase in the number of fake Web sites targeting popular shopping sites including eBay, Amazon, PayPal, and other e-commerce sites, pop up on Thanksgiving Day. Typically phishing Web sites are set up via compromised PCs of innocent businesses and are quickly shut down once the business has been notified. However, by exploiting the four-day Thanksgiving weekend in which most U.S. business activity shuts down on Thursday and Friday, scammers are banking on the idea that the sites will go uninterrupted because no one is available to take them offline.



Consumers need to be extra vigilant when shopping online this weekend, said Dean Drako, president and CEO of Barracuda Networks. Anyone planning to do holiday shopping online this weekend should go directly to the sites that they plan to purchase from, rather than click on URLs that arrive via emails.



The Thanksgiving surge in phishing Web sites has also created an increase in emails directing unsuspecting users to the sites directly by offering 'great deals' or 'sales' as well as emails that attempt to lure the recipient into verifying account information via a link to the fake sites.



We typically see an increase in phishing activity before a regular two-day weekend, but the volume of phishing sites and corresponding email in just this past 24 hours is quite astounding, said Drako. "We expect this blitz to continue over the next few days."



Barracuda Networks is working around the clock this weekend to ensure that its more than 50,000 customers worldwide are protected from this phishing attack. For more information on this weekends phishing activity, please visit Barracuda Central at www.barracudacentral.com.


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