Cognitive - Content

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Take back the Net

In one of my earlier Articles, I had written about Spywares and Adwares. Today in this article i will give information on internet crimes that you will find very intresting.

It is a fact that the useful life of some of the Spam domains can be less than a single day upto a maximum of 12 days, some of these domains exist for as little as 3 hours. This is not surprising as Verisign reports that Year over year, new .com domain registrations grew by 28 percent, and new .net domain registrations grew by 21 percent. In that time they exist, these Domains are used to send out millions of Spam messages, mostly using Bot nets. This makes things difficult for softwares to track some of these spam domains and block the messages.Some of these domains still exist, but they are not used for Spamming anymore. The year 2005 has seen more spams than 2004 and some of the new techniques adopted by spammers only makes things difficult for the security companies to block them.

Phishing is still an major threat and it's prevalence has only increased in 2005. A phishing attack is a confidence trick that uses email spam to spread. In computer security terms, it is a “social engineering” attack. It was estimated that 1 in every 304 emails during 2005 was a phishing attempt. A new trend in phishing is called Spear Phishing. In Spear phishing criminals bombard businesses with highly targeted spam that appears as though it has originated from inside the organization, typically from the IT or HR departments. Often, the perpetrator will offer a small reward in return for information and individuals who are duped into thinking the emails are legitimate often comply. They unwittingly reveal information that will enable the criminal to access secure areas of the corporate network which can result in the theft of intellectual property and other sensitive corporate data.

Pharming is an alternative technique that does not try to fool people through fake email messages, or spy on users through malware. Instead, this technique fools your computer into connecting you to a fake Web site even when you enter the correct domain name information into your browser.
Like phishing attacks, an attacker sets up a capture site to collect identity information. But unlike a phishing attack, this technique does not require the user to follow a link in a fake email message. Instead, this technique exploits vulnerabilities in DNS servers to distribute fake address information.

Convergence is a trend seen not only in networking world but also in the internet crime world. Increasingly, techniques such as phishing are being used as a bait for people opening malware. This is a bad trend from a user stand point as you are susceptible to a multiple pronged attack from a single source. Some Virus threats now, are not just limited to your PC, but rather your mobile devices are under threat too.

Internet commerce frauds are increasing , and top on that list is US counting for 84.9% of the fraudulent transactions.
The worse thing you could imagne is a vendor losing data of millions of its customers, and that happened galore in 2005. Just to name a few, several different large companies lost (or sold) detailed personal information about millions of people. Most notoriously, Choicepoint revealed that it had sold personal information on 400,000 Americans to a criminal ring engaged in identity theft, and Reed Elsevier (a subsidiary of Lexis Nexis) allowed information on 310,000 people to be accessed fraudulently. Bank of America lost a backup tape containing names and credit card numbers for 1.2 million government employees. This is not the end of the list ,but just a few.

And finally read this , filmy style hijacking - New Trojan holds files for ransom

I wonder why even with all these things around, the usage of Internet among people is only growing.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

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Help, please. All recommend this program to effectively advertise on the Internet, this is the best program!