The mystery surrounding the two unnamed tech giants that were duped out of more than $100m (£77.5m) in a phishing scam has (more…)
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The mystery surrounding the two unnamed tech giants that were duped out of more than $100m (£77.5m) in a phishing scam has (more…)
Posted by Mark Glenning
I recently wrote about a fake Facebook page named ‘Team Advert’* that was sharing posts by other Facebook pages and threatening to have the pages unpublished unless their owners ‘confirmed’ their identity by entering their username, password, and credit card number. I reported the page to Facebook and had it shut down. I then went a stage further and also reported their phishing site (to which the Facebook page linked) to the hosting company and had that closed down as well.
The Facebook page and the phishing website were both (more…)
Posted by Darren Jamieson
Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of scams on Facebook, such as the ‘win a car’ scams and the ‘win a PS4’ scams. They’re usually pretty easy to spot and they target casual Facebook users – people who wouldn’t necessarily know a genuine page from a fake one. However, a new type of scam emerged recently that was a lot more difficult to spot, and it targeted business owners who (more…)
Posted by Darren Jamieson
Last week, so annoyed was I at the current spate of Facebook scams doing the rounds, I created a video explaining how the ‘win a car’ scams work. The video is a near three minutes of pure anger and, to date, has generated thousands of views and around 100 shares on Facebook.
Have a watch and judge for yourself – I may have gone a bit overboard.
Did you watch it? Angry, eh?
It makes me angry because this has been going on for several years. I even wrote about it back in 2014.
Now, I’ve spoken with a few journalists this week about a possible feature on these scams, but the overriding response was one of indifference. The reason being they didn’t feel there was much to warn people about – there’s no real harm in these scams as nobody ends up out of pocket, and nobody is conned out of money.
This led me to think about the endgame of these scammers. Just getting hundreds of thousands of gullible people to share their page on Facebook isn’t the goal of the scammer. That’s merely a means to an end. If the journalists in the UK don’t feel there’s much to warn against, and the people sharing these scams don’t see the harm, perhaps it’s time we looked at exactly what could happen when you fall for the scam – if not to you then to (more…)
Posted by Darren Jamieson
Fraudsters that target the unwary through a phishing scam have adopted a different approach from their usual (more…)
Posted by Mark Glenning
I wouldn’t normally write a post about something like this for Engage Web. I would normally save this sort of thing for my personal blog, but this morning I saw that one of my friends had commented on this particular Facebook post, and it frightened me so much I had to share it.
While scrolling through my Facebook feed this morning, as thousands of others would have done, I saw the following image because one of my friends had (more…)
Posted by Darren Jamieson
A survey has revealed that half of all spam mail is sent from just 20 ISPs, with these so called ‘bad neighbourhoods’ being spread across the world.
The study, by a Dutch researcher, surveyed 42,201 ISPs in a bid to track where junk mail is sent from. Often having terribly constructed text or content stolen from other sites, spam and phishing is still a leading annoyance to (more…)
Posted by Carl Hopkinson
An illegal botnet, estimated to be taking over £1m (£635,000) a year through the exploitation of SEO practices, has been closed down by security teams in the US.
The Bamital-botnet, which is said to have up to one million computers, including many in the UK, was shut down by a team made up of Microsoft and Symantec. Several data centres in the US were raided.
The system worked by placing fraudulent links on SERPS, having analysed the search terms people were using. When the links were clicked on, Bamital would passively collect ID data when entered on the computer.
The scam went further too, through using already infected machines to “recruit” other computers.
Writing about the operation, Richard Boscovich of Microsoft said:
“In the last two years, more than eight million computers have been attacked by Bamital.
“The botnet’s search hijacking and click fraud schemes affected many major search engines and browsers, including those offered by Microsoft, Yahoo and Google.
“Because this threat exploited the search and online advertising platform to harm innocent people, Microsoft and Symantec chose to take action against the Bamital botnet to help protect people and advance cloud security for everyone.”
Boscovich said he was confident the team had taking out all threats of this particular scam, though there are many others out there. Not all use search engine optimisation analysis to operate though, with many more complex devices used.
This particular botnet is thought to be responisble for infecting anywhere between 300,000 and 1m machines, whilst 18 ringleaders have so far been identified.
Posted by Carl Hopkinson
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