Tag: IDENTITYTHEFT

Share Last November, Florida dentist Robert Thousand, Jr. was the victim of a denial-of-service attack where crooks initiated transfers totaling $399,000 from Thousand's Ameritrade retirement account. When Ameritrade attempted to call Thousand to confirm the transfer requests, Wired reports, the thief (or thieves) used several VoIP accounts and automated dialing software to tie up Thousand's ...

Radio frequency identification tags (RFID), which appear in items like credit cards and passports, have long been susceptible to hackers looking to steal personal information. Still, RFID tags are used in many ways -- from tracking a shipment of clothes to automatically opening a doggie door. But a breakthrough from a group of University of Arkansas scientists might just ease the minds of those ...

The FBI has busted up a major spam and bank fraud ring that spanned from coast to coast, and even had ties to Egypt. Fifty-three suspects in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Charlotte, North Carolina have been indicted, with dozens of them already in police custody. An additional 47 Egyptian suspects have been named, and authorities there are working to apprehend them now. The scam centered around ...

In a strange twist on a now familiar story, an English woman last May found that her bank account had been accessed by criminals and that the money therein had increased. Amanda Fothergill, 40, of Darlington, received a phone call from a stranger who claimed to have deposited a substantial amount of money in her account. Shocked, Fothergill checked her balance only to discover a brand new deposit ...

The RSA FraudAction Research Lab has uncovered a sophisticated and tricky new phishing scheme. Dubbed the 'Chat-in-the-Middle' scam, the new attack targets the online customers of a specific U.S. financial institution and begins, as many scams do, as an apparently innocent log-in screen. The new twist, though, appears after the marks have entered their log-in information. Typically, once ...

It's about time. The Associated Press writes today that mercifully, IBM reports that phishing attacks are on the decline. Phishing, for the uninitiated, has nothing to do with Vermont hippies. Phishing scams are typically comprised of a sketchy e-mail that links the recipient to a malicious Web page (often disguised as the log-in page of a bank or social networking site). There, the duped ...

Don't you love that lovely twist wherein the hunter becomes the hunted? Such was the case at the recent DefCon hackers' convention in Las Vegas, where a fake ATM was set up in the conference center of the Riviera Hotel Casino in order to steal account information from any gullible hackers who might cross it. Apparently, there were at least a few of them. (As of yet, no reports stating the exact ...

You wouldn't think that a business called A-1 Lock & Key would have too many break-ins. And you might not believe that a store called Jojo's Gun & Pawn would be prone to a rash of stick-ups. But Web broker and online marketing firm Network Solutions recently ran into a great big Network Problem when a hackers' long term infiltration of its servers left 573,928 names, addresses, and credit ...

South African crooks have recently focused their attention on Absa Bank, one of the African nation's largest financial institutions, by bombing several of the company's ATMs during the last year. In the Western Cape region, a popular tourist destination, authorities also claim to have identified approximately 40 data-stealing card-skimmers at various ATMs. To protect its machines -- and inflict ...

With more and more people using Wi-Fi-enabled devices -- from iPhones to netbooks to standard laptops -- the need for public Internet access is steadily growing. Unfortunately, cybercriminals are very aware of this fact and, according to Fox News, are exploiting it to the best of their ability. By creating phony Wi-Fi networks in places such as hotels and airports, crooks target carefree ...

Here is some terrifying news for those of you who are paranoid about identity theft: Criminals may be able to guess your Social Security Number (SSN) with little more than your birth date and home town. Researchers at Carnegie-Mellon have found that using only publicly available data, such as that posted to a Facebook profile, they were able to guess the first five digits of a person's SSN on ...

Phishing scams involving hijacked accounts and the dissemination of phony links have recently appeared on Facebook and Twitter, but now that strategy is returning -- albeit in a creepy new way -- to its old stomping grounds: e-mail. A group of Net grifters has been breaking into browser-based e-mail accounts (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, or AOL Mail), and sending dubious messages to everyone in the ...

Facebook has had its share of privacy and security issues, but a pair of professed Facebook fans at FBHive have recently found an easily exploitable hole that can reveal private information, even if the privacy settings are set to hide it. Thankfully, the folks at FBHive have not made public the details of the hole, which can allegedly reveal your hometown, relationship status, political views, ...

Imagine if the the characters in 'Oliver Twist' had access to the Internet and other high-tech equipment. Fagin's band of orphaned pickpockets wouldn't have stopped at just snatching wallets; they would have used the stolen credit cards to commit fraud, and the driver's licenses to steal identities. Well, according to FOX News, a Chicago-based group calling itself 'Cannon to the Wiz' has been ...

A man used hacking software to steal more than $100,000 from banking and brokerage accounts over a six-month period in 2007, according to Macworld. Alexey Mineev recently plead guilty to one count of money laundering in U.S. District Court. Mineev stole account numbers and passwords from users with a Trojan horse, which can pose as anything from a security patch to a screensaver. Then, he wired ...