The weirdest security stories of 2022

Theres been a lot of weird and frankly bizarre attacks over the course of 2022, nestled in amongst the usual ransomware outbreaks and data breaches. Whether were talking social media, email, or even malware, theres been a mind bending tale of tall behaviour in almost every corner. Its time to...

Text-based fraud: from 419 scams to vishing

E-mail scammers typically combine social engineering with technical skills to bypass spam filters and persuade the recipient to reply. But there is a specific class of attacks that is technically stuck somewhere in the late 90s/early 00s, in the era of CRT monitors and sluggish internet: we are...

Before He Spammed You, this Sly Prince Stalked Your Mailbox

A reader forwarded what he briefly imagined might be a bold, if potentially costly, innovation on the old Nigerian prince scam that asks for help squirreling away millions in unclaimed fortune: It was sent via the U.S. Postal Service, with a postmarked stamp and everything. In truth these old...

Deleted Facebook Cybercrime Groups Had 300,000 Members

Hours after being alerted by KrebsOnSecurity, Facebook last week deleted almost 120 private discussion groups totaling more than 300,000 members who flagrantly promoted a host of illicit activities on the social media network's platform. The scam groups facilitated a broad spectrum of shady...

A week in security (January 8 – January 14)

It's very early in the year, yet everyone has already had a complete meltdown pun intended over a number of serious vulnerabilities found in legacy and modern microprocessors. Last week, rightly so, vendors released patches for hardware and OSes to help mitigate these threats. However, problems i...

Of princes and perpetrators: Beware of getting ensnared in 419 scams

We've mentioned before that 419 scams don't always originate from Nigeria. It's a very simple and popular scam that can be attempted by pretty much anyone with a flair for social engineering. Indeed, 419 scams are so associated with the region that many scammers in non-Nigerian countries know the...

Olympic Flavored 419 Scams Exploit London Games Fervor

Olympic themed fraud, email scams, and spam campaigns are so banal right now that the official website of the 2012 London Olympic Games contains not only a ‘stay safe online’ page but has also compiled a downloadable list of known scams. The “Stay safe online” page of the London Games’ website...

In UK Analytics Software Provides Enhanced (Online) Interrogation For Fraud Suspects

A recent report by the UK’s Serious Organized Crime Agency SOCA shows that the Agency is full speed ahead with plans to use powerful data analytics tools to help find and prosecute everything from money laundering to illegal gambling to 419 scams. The 2011 Annual Report on Suspicious Activity...

Online crime complaints hit record high in 2008

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center IC3 says complaints of online crime hit a record high in 2008, driven mostly by non-delivery of goods and service and those pesky 419 Nigerian e-mail scams. Accordign to a new report PDF from ic3.gov, the center received a a total of 275,284 complaints, a...