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How to Buy Friends and Deceive People
Want more friends and followers? Emerging enterprises will create them for you — for a price. An abundance of low-cost, freelance labor online is posing huge challenges for Internet companies trying...
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‘Right-to-Left Override’ Aids Email Attacks
Computer crooks and spammers are abusing a little-known encoding method that makes it easy to disguise malicious executable files (.exe) as relatively harmless documents, such as text or Microsoft...
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Attackers Hit Weak Spots in 2-Factor Authentication
An attack late last week that compromised the personal and business Gmail accounts of Matthew Prince, chief executive of Web content delivery system CloudFlare, revealed a subtle but dangerous...
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Cyberheist Smokescreen: Email, Phone, SMS Floods
It was early October 2011, and I was on the treadmill checking email from my phone when I noticed several hundred new messages had arrived since I last looked at my Gmail inbox just 20 minutes...
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Spam Volumes: Past & Present, Global & Local
Last week, National Public Radio aired a story on my Pharma Wars series, which chronicles an epic battle between men who ran two competing cybercrime empires that used spam to pimp online pharmacy...
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The Value of a Hacked Email Account
One of the most-viewed stories on this site is a blog post+graphic that I put together last year to illustrate the ways that bad guys can monetize hacked computers. But just as folks who don’t bank...
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How Much is Your Gmail Worth?
If you use Gmail and have ever wondered how much your account might be worth to cyber thieves, have a look at Cloudsweeper, a new service launching this week that tries to price the value of your Gmail...
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Buying Battles in the War on Twitter Spam
The success of social networking community Twitter has given rise to an entire shadow economy that peddles dummy Twitter accounts by the thousands, primarily to spammers, scammers and malware...
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Expect Phishers to Up Their Game in 2016
Expect phishers and other password thieves to up their game in 2016: Both Google and Yahoo! are taking steps to kill off the password as we know it. New authentication methods now offered by Yahoo! and...
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The Limits of SMS for 2-Factor Authentication
A recent ping from a reader reminded me that I’ve been meaning to blog about the security limitations of using cell phone text messages for two-factor authentication online. The reader’s daughter had...
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