Author Archive
Facebook Scam: How to Get Rich on the Internet
By Francois Paget at 11 June, 2010, 9:49 am
In one of my Facebook accounts, I received an invitation this morning–from a friend–to join a group named Drop The Internet Stacks of Money And Quit Your Job. This group directs its members to a website that offers an Online Success Kit, which claims to help anyone make some easy extra cash, up to millions [...]
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Loading ...McAfee Helps FTC, FBI in Case Against ‘Scareware’ Outfit
By Francois Paget at 1 June, 2010, 5:35 pm
In October 2009 during the McAfee FOCUS 09 conference, my colleague Dirk Kollberg gave a talk on Innovative Marketing Ukraine (IMU), a subsidiary of Innovative Marketing, Inc., which the U.S. Federal Trade Commission accused of creating massive “scareware” schemes–-alarming messages falsely claiming that scans had detected viruses, spyware, and illegal pornography on consumers’ computers.
For a [...]
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...An Overview of Exploit Packs
By Francois Paget at 29 May, 2010, 12:01 am
Today’s cybercriminals frequently use “exploit packs” to easily snare victims for their botnets. Users with underprotected computers who visit booby-trapped websites become the latest botnet zombies. I often receive requests asking me which exploit packs are current and which vulnerabilities they use.
To answer these inquiries, I’ve created a table that lists the exploits referenced by [...]
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...‘Scareware’ Poses Danger to Consumers
By Francois Paget at 15 March, 2010, 6:46 am
On March 9 McAfee warned consumers that “scareware,” or fake anti-virus software, may be the most costly online scam in 2010, causing significant monetary loss and damage to users’ computers. In this blog, I’ll give you some additional details about the figures we cited last week in McAfee’s new Consumer Threat Alert program.
Apart from the [...]
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Wiseguys Botnet First in Line for Concert, Sports Tickets
By Francois Paget at 5 March, 2010, 12:01 pm
We frequently read stories about spammers who can circumvent CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) authentication. Using bot-infected machines, they can create a vast number of random e-mail accounts for spamming purposes.
This week, a federal judge in Newark, New Jersey, revealed the latest use of a botnet-like network with [...]
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Collateral Damage (continued)
By Francois Paget at 7 August, 2009, 7:36 am
While Dmitri Alperovitch wrote his blog entry about the recent DDoS attack against Twitter and some other platforms hosting accounts of a pro-Georgian blogger nicknamed cyxymu, I browsed the Internet, searching for malicious websites taking advantage of this topic.
In second place in my google search request, I was attracted by a link proposing to add the blogger [...]
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