Romanian cops cuff 20 phishing suspects( old news - 02:01PM Saturday Mar 14 2009) By John Leyden The Register Romania police arrested 20 suspected phishing fraud suspects on Wednesday. Stefan Negrila, chief of the organised crime police in the western Romanian city of Timisoara, said the alleged hackers set up counterfeit banking websites that they used to trick surfers in Italy and Spain into handing over sensitive login credentials. Phishing mule accomplices in the targeted countries then used these stolen credentials to "cash out" compromised accounts in a fraud whose losses might run into hundreds of thousands of euros, The International Herald Tribune reports Full article here: Big phishcomments?
Spot the Tiny Phishing Trick( old news - 11:17AM Saturday Mar 14 2009) Erik Larkin PC World Mar 13, 2009 11:45 am The TinyURL service allows you to enter a long URL, such as one for a particular Google Maps location, and convert it into a short, easy-to-type or e-mail link. Good for sending links - or as Trend Micro reports, for hiding a malicious Web site URL in a phishing e-mail. Trend says the dirty trick, which it first reported on in February, is becoming more popular and spreading into multiple languages. The ruse is intended to make it more difficult for the wary to immediately peg a link as suspicious when they mouseover a link to see where it actually goes. Full article herecomments?
Major data breach could put police officers at risk of identity theft BY: Shaun Nichols in San Francisco vnunet.com, 06 Mar 2009 A recent offline data breach may have put tens of thousands of New York City police officers at risk of identity theft. According to local media reports, a man has been arrested and charged with illegally entering a data warehouse in the borough of Staten Island and stealing an unencrypted storage cassette belonging to the department's pension fund office. Full story herecomments?
By Elinor Mills CNET March 6, 2009 3:54 PM PST BERKELEY, Calif.--Six years after California enacted the country's first data breach notification law, many state residents have received letters warning them that their data was exposed by a breach but usually they don't know how or how long, experts said at a privacy conference on Friday. That would change with the passage of a measure proposed by California State Sen. Joe Simitian, who authored the country's first bill requiring companies to notify customers when a breach has occurred that exposes their data. Senate Bill 20 would require that notification letters to consumers have a standard set of information such as information about the timing and circumstances of the breach. Full story herecomments?
Companies, authorities fawn over informatics whiz
By Dan Goodin in San Francisco for The Register
2nd March 2009
Software companies and government officials in Italy are falling over themselves to recruit a 22-year-old hacker serving a three-year prison sentence for electronic fraud.
Gabriel Bogdan Ionescu, who is incarcerated at the Bassone Penitentiary in Como in northern Italy, has already been admitted to that country's prestigious Polytechnic University of Milano, thanks to help from Italian authorities.  story continues..1 comment
by Elinor Mills
CNET News
When we think of phishing attacks, in which scammers try to lure sensitive information out of Internet users, we think of fake official-looking e-mails and Web sites.
But you don't even need to be online to get phished. story continues..comments?
Why pay when you can pwn? By John Leyden The Register 2nd March 2009 Three in four phishing sites are hosted on compromised servers, according to a new survey. A study of 2,486 fraudulent websites found that 76 per cent were housed on hacked webservers, typically pwned after hackers identified well-known vulnerabilities using search engine queries. Free web hosting for fraudulent websites was used in just 17.4 per cent of cases. Full article via The Registercomments?
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