Online Dating, Online Fraud: It’s All Relative

To me, online dating these days is not much different than online fraud. I speak from personal experience on both – as someone who has experienced the thrills of online dating sites (NOTE sarcasm here) and has the privilege of witnessing the latest online scams that fraudsters pull on a daily basis. I live in both worlds – and trust me, they are not much different.

Living Under Watchful Eyes as a Fraudster

The fallout from the news of the Global Payments breach may be just subsiding, but one thing can already be said – this probably isn’t the last processor that will be breached.

Now You Z-(eus) It, Now You Don’t: Zeus Bots Silently Upgraded to Citadel

The FraudAction Research Lab has recently analyzed a Zeus 2.1.0.1 variant downloading an additional Trojan into infected PCs by fetching a Citadel Trojan. RSA is witness to many Zeus botmasters who upgraded and moved up to Ice IX neighborhoods, and now, to yet another summer home – Citadel infrastructures.

Will big data know you better than you know yourself?

There was lots of buzz about big data at RSA Conference, especially in terms of the essential role that big data analytics increasingly plays in detecting data exfiltration and other security issues. Using big data for security is clearly a significant opportunity. But the security and privacy of big data is equally important and yet got much less attention. These concerns did come up in the Tuesday afternoon panel on big data, during which Rick Mogull of Securosis articulated the distinction between securing big data and using big data for security. But for me the most striking insight about the security and privacy issues for big data was in the discussion that Hugh Thompson and Dan Gardener had during the Friday afternoon “Hugh Thompson Show”.

Ice IX Goes Global: Automatic Matching of HTML Injections with Victim’s Language

Fraudsters continue to extend their global reach through geo-targeted services and crimeware strains: Country-specific malware-infection services are readily sold to bot-herders via dedicated websites, with rates ranging from $30 to $250 per 1,000 infected computers. Ready-made botnets can be purchased in the underground along with HTML injections that target the region’s largest financial institutions, enabling [...]

Localization in the Fraud Underground: When Fraudsters from the Same Locale Get Together

Everybody knows that the Russian fraudsters are more sophisticated than their English-speaking counterparts. However, this isn’t the only geographic-related difference between fraudsters.

What you don’t see can hurt you: Cybercriminals covering their tracks

Over the past few weeks, there have been several reports about the ways in which cybercriminals are making it harder to detect fraud by concealing what they’re doing as evidenced by a new kind of man-in-the-middle attack on Facebook users.

Blackhat Tool Shop is Open for Business

In one of its recent findings, RSA FraudAction Research Labs has uncovered yet another new underground shop which was opened a few weeks ago, selling fraud commodities e-commerce style. The new shop offers access to compromised resources, compromised webmaster credentials, and custom PHP coding for their cybercrime clientele.

Vishing: To Have Your Identity Stolen, Press One

Of all the terms describing identity theft methods, “Vishing” (which stands for “Voice Phishing”) is perhaps the most ambiguous one. A simple Google query for the definition of the term shows just some of its multiple interpretations. But why are fraudsters using this type of attack?

All Those Years Ago: Looking back at the early days of cybercrime & fraud at RSA

Over the past 6+ years at RSA I’ve seen a lot of changes at RSA from acquisitions to new product launches to the dreaded “end of life” of a product.  I’ve seen the group I originally start in grow from less than a dozen people to one of the largest segments of the company.  I’ve [...]