These 2 men got hit hard.  With charges of unauthorized computer access, identity theft, conspiracy, and wire fraud, they could face up to 20 years in prison and $250k in fines.  That may sound like a little overkill, but all of those charges are really affiliated with altering grades: broadly speaking, you have to access […]

Recently, a couple of doctorates from Carnegie Melon conducted a study over a 7-month period.  In that period, 2.4 Gb of chat information was logged and an estimated $37 million worth of fraudulent credit card transactions were recorded.  While it seemed this study primarily focused on IRC communications, they brought up an ironically amusing way […]

If this is carried out by all retailers large and small, it could have a huge impact on the amount of identities stolen.  The Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council issued a data security guideline that could be not only simple, but extremely effective.  The idea is this: not allowing businesses to store credit card […]

It’s amazing the amount of personal information some people will post about themselves on various social networking sites.  Without even knowing who could be on the other end of a line, people are willing to freely hand over such things as their email addresses, dates of birth and even their own physical addresses.  With the […]

It sounds like some people were trying to create some irony in this situation.  For about an hour, some people posted somewhere in the vicinity of 1,200 eBay identities, which included things like phone numbers, mailing addresses and credit card information in an anti-fraud forum.  Chances are the way these people were able to do […]

Many people are probably familiar with the whole e-card fiasco where people would send people e-cards bundled with malware, but there is now something new that you should know about.  You can consider this more of an ‘indirect’ method of phishing, but it will probably still work very well.  Phishers are now mass-sending emails that […]

The results of this report were very interesting and honestly surprised me. Not only were malicious tactics covered, but the report also talked about secure operating systems and browsers. This report seems to be changing the paradigm on a couple of things: Internet Explorer will become more secure than Firefox and the idea […]

A team of identity thieves in conjunction with their army of botnets have decided to target eBay and acquire people’s accounts. This multi-tiered campaign of theirs seems to be working, as they may have been doing this since early August. One of the things I found interesting about this is some of the […]

The Trojan that was able to breach through Monster.com’s defenses seems to have claimed quite a few resume’s; 1.3 million according to this article. At this point, Monster states that they will be strengthening their security as well as contact the people who have had their resume’s stolen via this Trojan. One […]

A couple of weeks ago, some people broke into an office at Yale University to steal some computers and sell them for some profit. What these thieves didn’t know was that the computers they stole had over 10,000 social security numbers from past and present students as well as faculty from Yale. Fortunately, […]