On the Wire Podcast: Michael Tiffany
Cybercriminals depend upon the income they generate from their schemes to fund further operations, and one of the main ways that they extract money from victims is through ad fraud. This week, researchers at White Ops disclosed the existence of the Methbot ad fraud network, which is using a sophisticated worldwide infrastructure and custom browsers […]
Massive Methbot Ad Fraud Network Steals Millions Per Day
Cybercriminals are using a sophisticated botnet operation to impersonate both websites and visitors in order to steal as much as $5 million in ad revenue per day from publishers, according to new research into the network, known as Methbot. The botnet is enmeshed in the online ad infrastructure and has its own elaborate support system, […]
Mobile Wallets Present New Opportunities for Fraud
One of the great things about the advanced mobile devices everyone carries now is that they serve so many different purposes. They’re encyclopedias, world maps, communications devices, and now they’ve evolved to become wallets, too. But as convenient as mobile wallet technology is, it carries with it some unique threats and risks for both consumers […]
Google Releases Project Wycheproof Crypto Test Suite
Google has released a new set of tests it uses to probe cryptographic libraries for vulnerabilities to known attacks. The tests can be used against most kinds of crypto algorithms and the company already has found 40 new weaknesses in existing algorithms. the tests are called Project Wycheproof, and Google’s engineers designed them to help […]
Hailstorm Spam Campaigns Being Used to Evade Defenses
In an effort to get past anti-spam and anti-malware systems and put their garbage in front of potential victims, some spammers are avoiding the traditional strategy of sending huge volumes of mail for long periods of time in favor of sending large bursts of spam in a very short timeframe. This technique, known as hailstorm […]
70 Percent of Enterprise Ransomware Victims Paid Up, Data Shows
Ransomware gangs have been targeting businesses in the last few months, seeking bigger paydays than what they can extract from consumers. The plan has been highly successful, according to new data, which shows that 70 percent of businesses infected with ransomware have paid the ransom to get their data back. Researchers at IBM Security’s X-Force […]
Transactional Fraud a Rising Threat For Contact Centers
The fraud landscape is a complex one, and the criminals who run these schemes have a wide variety of ruses to choose from. Which one a fraudster selects for a given attack can depend upon the target, the end goal, and the criminal’s particular talents. Almost all of these scams involve some form of social […]
Yahoo Data Breach Highlights Defender’s Disadvantage
For the second time in less than three months, Yahoo has disclosed a massive data breach, and this is one for the record books. The company said more than one billion accounts are affected by the breach, and Yahoo officials still aren’t exactly sure how the attackers got in. On Wednesday evening, Yahoo CISO Bob […]
Beta Firmware Update Available for Vulnerable Netgear Routers
With exploit code publicly available and details of the vulnerability widely known, Netgear has released a beta version of new firmware to fix a bug in several of its routers that attackers can use to execute arbitrary code on the devices. The Netgear router vulnerability affects several of the company’s home router models, including the R6250, R6400, […]