Phishing Phollies

Don’t forget to read the comments where poor retarded "AngelO" tries to tout his "application" as a wonderful tool because he loves macs…. blah blah blah…..  He admits he is trying to scam people by using fake "alerts" and that you don’t really need those files even if they are not "violations". He calls it "marketing"…

Speaking of Macs…. is that Hell I hear freezing over???

"January 15, 2008 (Computerworld) — Mac users can now claim their first example of "scareware," a widespread scam in the Windows world where bogus security software tries to spook consumers into anteing up, an antivirus vendor reported today.

MacSweeper, which sells for $39.99 through a Web site by the same name, is a rogue application that will "always find something to fix/clean, but the only way to do so is to buy the program," claimed Patrik Runald, a senior security specialist at Helsinki, Finland-based F-Secure Corp., in a posting to the company’s blog.

"Even more telling that it’s a scam is the fact that when you visit the MacSweeper site with a PC and click on ‘Scan,’ it will tell you that you have security vulnerabilities in folders that only exist on [the] Mac, like ’system_root/home," said Runald. "Fake? Oh yeah."

Additional clues about the application’s illegitimacy, added Runald, are easy to spot. The MacSweeper Web site, for example, includes text under an "About us" heading that is a brazen copy-and-paste from the Symantec Corp. site.

MacSweeper.com, which was registered in November 2007, uses a domain name server based in Ukraine, according to a WHOIS search. The individuals who registered the domain, however, masked their identities using an anonymity service.

MacSweeper, said Runald, is a cousin to the Windows scareware dubbed Cleanator, just one of numerous rogue security programs on that platform that try to dupe users out of money and/or credit card account information by posing as useful software. Among the most notorious scareware applications on Windows: SpySheriff, WinFixer and IEDefender.

"What does the first Mac rogue application really mean?" asked Runald. "It means that … Mac users will increasingly come under attack from bad guys. It doesn’t mean that Mac is becoming less secure in and of itself. But it does mean that Mac users will have to watch out for social engineering tricks just like Windows users have had to do for years."

"Following yesterday’s blog post, the developers of MacSweeper posted this comment:

That may not be such a bad idea though. Read on…

From ComputerWorld

"January 14, 2008 (Network World) — A new Trojan program is targeting unwitting users’ bank data by intercepting account information before it is encrypted and sending it to an attacker’s central database."

No true and proud Geek would ever claim to be above infiltration. As my husband always says, "The first rule of advertising is to LIE!" Geek.com called themselves "GEEKS" and claimed to be invincible. Two lies revealed in one quick line of code….

 This attack is not just on the archaic sites buried in the dust of the Internet. We are talking some pretty major sites. SANS Internet Storm Center reports that the viral script hosts can be searched for on Google.

One host is uc8010[dot]com. This Google search resulted in sites such as HGTV, netmagazines, virginia.gov, tnstate.edu, livingbeyondbreastcancer.org, cleveland.oh.us, ca.com and several thousand more even after 4 days.

 But, there’s more: ucmal[dot]com is another script host spewing this crap. This search resulted in over 90,000 hits, including myspace and many Chinese language sites.

So, my friends, you may want to make sure you are blocking JavaScript from running freely on your browsers or do a search on any site you want to visit before going. Luckily, Truffuls is not a Windows site and a search of "uc8010.com/0.js truffuls" and "ucmal.com/0.js truffuls" resulted in no matches!

"Crime and punishment: The white knight of phish-busting

Robert McMillan

December 31, 2007 (IDG News Service) Until just a few months ago,

Gary Warner did not have the kind of day job you’d expect from an antiphishing crusader. He didn’t work for a security vendor or a bank, or any kind of company you’d expect to care about phishing.

Warner’s career as a cyber-sleuth began on Halloween 2000. That’s when his company’s Web site was defaced by an entity named Pimpshiz as part of a pro-Napster Internet graffiti campaign.

"My boss came to me and said, ‘Find out who did this and put them in jail,’" said Warner, who was at the time an IT staffer with Energen, a Birmingham, Alabama oil and gas company.

It was an eye-opening experience. "I called the police and they were like, ‘What do you want us to do?’" he said.

Months later, when Pimpshiz struck servers at NASA, Warner reached out, calling staff there and saying "Hey, we know who this guy is. Here’s his name and address."

Since then, Warner has quietly become one of the most-respected authorities on phishing in the U.S. — the kind of guy that federal agents and banking IT staff call when they want to know how to catch the bad guys and shut down their credit-card-stealing Web sites.

With Warner’s help, authorities eventually arrested Pimpshiz, whose real name is Robert Lyttle, in connection with the defacements.

Fishing for phishers

Warner said that the Pimpshiz case was formative, underlining how hard it is for law enforcement to catch the bad guys on the Internet.

"The experience showed me that it’s not that they don’t care," Warner said. "Their hands are tied by the legal process."

Soon, Warner found himself spending dozens of hours each week compiling data on spammers and phishing attacks. "I would sit for a couple of hours every morning and find all the new phishing sites that I could," he said.

He’d take screenshots of the sites, e-mail the Webmasters who were hosting them and ask them for Web logs, and eventually he started making connections — he’d connect one phishing group with several different attacks — and learn who he needed to call to get Web sites removed, no matter where in the world they were hosted.

He’d get calls from IT staff at small credit unions asking for help taking down fraudulent sites, every day, all day long. It was cutting in on his work. Late last year, he decided to make a change. "I went to my boss and told him that I’m going to look for a way to do this full time."

Helping the feds crack down on online fraud

In July, with recommendations from FBI and Secret Service agents, Warner took a job as Director of Research in Computer Forensics with the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB).

He also began working with law enforcement, not only educating FBI and Secret Service agents on how crimes were committed, but also helping to track down the criminals and helping with take-downs.

"He’s an outstanding resource for the FBI," said Dale Miskell, supervisory special agent with the FBI’s Birmingham Cyber Crime unit, who has worked with Warner since 2005.

Miskell said Warner has helped the FBI with investigations and taught staff about his antiphishing techniques.

"He could be a multimillionare by his skillsets… he’s a very gifted speaker, he can talk to the techies, and then he can turn around and talk to the non-techies and everyone will understand."

Warner is now focusing on fighting cyber-crime full-time and on training a new generation of network forensics investigators. "You wouldn’t believe the looks on their eyes the first time they got an e-mail back from a Webmaster saying, ‘Thanks for letting me know. I just shut that down.’"

When he spoke with IDG News, it was five days after final exams at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and though it would have no effect on their marks, four students were still coming into the labs to help shut down phishers.

"That idea that as a private citizen, you can help, that’s the kind of thing we’re trying to inspire," he said.

The future of phish-busting

At the University, Warner is building up a 256-node supercomputer which could eventually become the largest collection of spam email on the planet, processing as many as 100 million email messages per day and providing researchers and law enforcement with valuable analysis data.

For Warner, the work isn’t so much a job, as it is his moral responsibility as a computer scientist. "One of the things that really bothered me from the very beginning was people who were using my field to attack other people," he said. "The way I see it, this is our Internet. I’m going to stand at the end of my driveway and protect what’s mine."

He says that his anti-phishing work hardly feels like work at all. "This is what I like to do," he said. "It’s cheaper than golf, and you can do it when the weather’s bad."

What you can do to protect yourself

"The best people that help law enforcement have no motive other than to catch the bad guy," said one law enforcement official who declined to be identified because he hadn’t been authorized to speak with the press.

But even if you’re not a cyber sleuth, if you get hit by a computer criminal there are some things you can do to help police catch the criminal. What you should do depends a little bit on the crime. If you’re the victim of identity theft, it’s worth filing a report with state and local police so that you have a record of the crime.

That comes in handy later, in case you need to prove that it was the thief, and not you, that incurred any subsequent charges. Another good place to stop is the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) site, which has a variety of tools to help identity theft victims get organized and set their credit back on track. And if things get really bad, the Social Security Administration can help you, too. This site has instructions on how to report social security fraud and get a new social security number.

You can file a report with the FTC, but if you want your data to be used to catch the bad guys, the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) is a better bet. Run in part by the FBI, the IC3 data is used regularly by law enforcement to link together large schemes. The more factual data you can report about your crime, the more useful it will be to police. Sometimes a single fax number or eBay ID can help crack open an entire case.

The FBI is most interested in crimes that involve malicious software, phishing, and child pornography. Spam and auction fraud get a lower priority and, worse, if you’re the victim of an auction fraud, the odds of you ever getting your money back are very low.

Still, if you’re rigorous about documenting the crime, and you fill out that IC3 complaint, you just may be helping to bring down your criminal — some day."