Saturday, August 18, 2007

jacked bank account, illustrated

i've worked in security for a very longggggggggg time. it's often hard to explain to people the impact of online threats. i've found that statistics don't mean much to people in this area other than biznesses trying to justify corp expenditures. the only things that have really driven consumer purchases in info security have been massive worms which crippled computers and then spyware & adware which also had a direct, visible impact. well, both of those have gone away to be replaced by silent crimeware which steals data. so what happens when your bank account gets jacked by the baddies in belarus? the photo here was taken from our online fraud community monitoring tool and is still available online from a photo sharing site. the thief was either bragging or showing off the wares for purchase.
my basic advice? keep your system & apps (esp. internet explorer) up-to-date, use security s/w, and anything that looks to good to be true most certainly is trying to pull one over on you. if you need sec s/w, ping me.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I tune in for an amusing anecdote or funny observation and I get a public service announcement? Soo disappointed.... I'm going to have something to say to Jane about this if she comes back to work. :)

Erin