Human Fraud: Detecting Them Before They Detect You

This is Part II of a two-part blog series taking readers inside the criminal enterprise that is account-takeover fraud. For part I, please click here. In my last blog, we focused on the initial phases of the account-takeover ATO kill chain – recon, weaponization and delivery – and how attackers...

We Infiltrated a Counterfeit Check Ring! Now What?

Imagine waking up each morning knowing the identities of thousands of people who are about to be mugged for thousands of dollars each. You know exactly when and where each of those muggings will take place, and youve shared this information in advance with the authorities each day for a year with...

Banking Attacks Surge Along with Post-COVID Economy

For many, COVID-19 has been a crushing catastrophe. But for bank scammers, it’s shaped up to be a nice little money-making opportunity. As the post-pandemic economy roars back to life, cybercriminals are using a new whirlwind of transactions as cover to launch an extraordinary number of bank frau...

A "DFUR-ent" Perspective on Threat Modeling and Application Log Forensic Analysis

Many organizations operating in e-commerce, hospitality, healthcare, managed services, and other service industries rely on web applications. And buried within the application logs may be the potential discovery of fraudulent use and/or compromise! But, let's face it, finding evil in application...

Deepfakes or not: new GAN image stirs up questions about digital fakery

Subversive deepfakes that enter the party unannounced, do their thing, then slink off into the night without anybody noticing are where it’s at. Easily debunked clips of Donald Trump yelling THE NUKES ARE UP or something similarly ludicrous are not a major concern. We’ve already dug into why that...

U.S. Secret Service: “Massive Fraud” Against State Unemployment Insurance Programs

A well-organized Nigerian crime ring is exploiting the COVID-19 crisis by committing large-scale fraud against multiple state unemployment insurance programs, with potential losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars, according to a new alert issued by the U.S. Secret Service. A memo seen by...

When in Doubt: Hang Up, Look Up, & Call Back

Many security-conscious people probably think they'd never fall for a phone-based phishing scam. But if your response to such a scam involves anything other than hanging up and calling back the entity that claims to be calling, you may be in for a rude awakening. Here's how one security and...

October Release: Q&A with Ari Weil

Shortly after Akamai announced the October 2019 Release with new features and capabilities across its security, performance and media product lines, Akamai's VP of Product Marketing, Ari Weil, took over Akamai's Twitter account for a live October Release Q&A. For those that missed the live event,...

How Machine Learning is Changing the Face of Financial Services

Artificial intelligence AI has become integrated into our everyday lives. It powers what we see in our social media newsfeeds, activates facial recognition to unlock our smartphones, and even suggests music for us to listen to. Machine learning, a subset of AI, is progressively integrating into o...

SAS 2019: Genesis Marketplace Peddles 60K Stolen Digital Identities

SINGAPORE – A newly-discovered underground marketplace, dubbed Genesis, is peddling tens of thousands of stolen digital “masks” — i.e., identities — which equip cybercriminals with the tools they need to get away with online fraud. Researchers at Kaspersky Lab’s Security Analyst Summit 2019, whic...

No Data is an Island: One Infosec Pro’s Experience As a Consumer Involved in a Data Breach

British Airways BA was hit by a major breach that resulted in a loss of customer records. I was notified promptly by BA. I thought their public response was timely. By the way, this breach was announced while I was about to board a BA flight to Heathrow. My credit card was used to purchase my...

Chaturbate: Reflected XSS on secure.chaturbate.com

The hacker found that an external asset used for fraud detection on secure.chaturbate.com was not sanitizing input parameters and could be used for reflected XSS. This external asset was removed...

On Financial Fraud

There are some good lessons in this article on financial fraud: That's how we got it so wrong. We were looking for incidental breaches of technical regulations, not systematic crime. And the thing is, that's normal. The nature of fraud is that it works outside your field of vision, subverting the...

Threat Outbreak Alert RuleID31285: Email Messages Distributing Malicious Software on November 14, 2017

Medium Alert ID: 55910 First Published: 2017 November 14 14:50 GMT Version: 1 Summary Cisco Security has detected significant activity related to spam email messages distributing malicious software. Email messages that are related to this threat RuleID31285 may contain the following files: Name |...

Fraud Detection in Pokémon Go

I play Pokémon Go. There, I've admitted it. One of the interesting aspects of the game I've been watching is how the game's publisher, Niantic, deals with cheaters. There are three basic types of cheating in Pokémon Go. The first is botting, where a computer plays the game instead of a person. Th...

Beyond Catching Sender Spoofing – using AI to stop email fraud and Business Email Compromise

In September, we announced our new email security technologies powered by XGen™ and a new product, Smart Protection for Office 365. One key technology introduced was our new AI based Email fraud, or Business Email Compromise BEC, detection technique. A user receiving a BEC email will have a...

Private Eye Allegedly Used Leaky Goverment Tool in Bid to Find Tax Data on Trump

In March 2017, KrebsOnSecurity warned that thieves who perpetrate tax refund fraud with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service were leveraging a widely-used online student loan tool to find critical data on consumers that allows them to claim huge refunds with the IRS in someone else's name. This week...

3 Mobile UK Hacked – 6 Million Customers' Private Data at risk

Three, one of UK's biggest mobile operators, has become the latest victim of a massive data breach that reportedly left the personal information and contact details of 6 Million of its customers exposed. The company admitted the data breach late Thursday, saying that computer hackers gained acces...

​Google, Yahoo, Facebook Collaborate to Blacklist Bad Bots

The major tech companies including Google, Facebook, and Yahoo! have joined their hands to launch a new program meant to block fake web traffic by blacklisting flagged IP addresses. Today, majority of data center traffic is non-human or illegitimate, so to fight against this issue the Trustworthy...

IBM Outs Dyre Wolf Campaign Steals $1 Million

The Dyre banking Trojan‘s ascension to the top of the financial malware food chain took a massive leap forward in the first three months of 2015. Already spreading a damaging piece of malware that targets corporate bank accounts, the Eastern European keepers of Dyre recently upped their social...