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Nigerian Email Scams Alive and Well

Nigerian email scams have been ongoing for more than a decade and in that time have morphed, spread, and evolved from simple pleas for money from consumers to highly targeted schemes going after multi-million companies. And though law enforcement agencies have been following them for years, arrests and indictments related to these scams are still rare. […]

IRS Tax Scams Remained Major Threat in 2015

The most dangerous piece of software installed on any computer is the browser, as it is the key target of the vast majority of online attacks. In the same way, the phone quickly is becoming one of the more dangerous devices you can own. Phone fraud scams, whether they target businesses or individual users, have become highly […]

The $1.5 Million Phone Call

Law enforcement agencies, politicians, and security experts often cite cybercrime as perhaps the largest threat to consumers and businesses right now. Finding an accurate estimate of the annual losses from cybercrime is more difficult than finding an honest politician, but certainly it’s in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Indeed, the disruption of botnets or […]

Welcome to On the Wire

The Internet is useful for a lot of things—watching videos of dogs dancing to Toto, ordering drone-delivered ice cream—but it has become less-than-useful at the task that it was originally designed for: organizing information and connecting people to that information. The sheer volume of data, opinions, and speculation available on any given topic makes it […]

Anatomy of a Phone Fraud Scam

When Nargess Sadjady answered the phone at her home in London one early evening in August, the man on the other end gave her some disquieting news: There were some suspicious online purchases on her account. The caller spoke with a soft Scottish accent and said he was from the security team at her bank, […]

Four Men Convicted in Huge Phone Fraud Scam in UK

Prosecutors in the United Kingdom have convicted four men in connection with a widespread phone fraud scam that saw them steal more than £600,000 (more than $912,000) from a number of elderly victims over the course of a year. The men ran a version of a common scam in which they posed as police officers and called victims, […]

Social Engineering Protection Comes to Android

Google, as the de facto owner of the Internet, is in a unique position to effect change on the network, and one piece of that equation is the ability to protect users from various threats. That can take a number of forms, and the most recent move from the company is a change to Android that […]

FTC Rule Change Cracks Down on Payment Methods Used by Fraudsters

The Federal Trade Commission is trying to cut off some of the sources of money that flow from consumers to phone scammers by tightening up the rules on how specific forms of payment can be used. The changes come as consumers are facing an onslaught of increasingly sophisticated and persistent campaigns from scammers pretending to be […]

For Attackers, Knowledge is Power

The password is among the oldest security artifacts that we have. It was in use for thousands of years, mainly in military applications, before some misguided soul had the idea to use a password for authentication on a computer system. We all know how that’s worked out. In the decades since then, things have not […]