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Miami is riskiest city for online fraud

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According to a new survey, New Yorkis no longer the U.S. city eCommerce merchants fear most. That dubious distinction now belongs to Miami. In the survey, an annual poll of online merchants commissioned by CyberSource Corporation, merchants were asked “What single major U.S. or Canadian city presented the highest risk of online fraud?” No city garnered a majority of the votes, but this year Miami surpassed New York City. Runners up were Los Angeles and Chicago. Other cities receiving votes included Detroit, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco.

In the “Riskiest Country” category, Nigeria easily retained its position as number one, with more than three times the votes of the next country. Runners up were the UK in second place, Ghana in third, Indonesia in fourth, and China in fifth. Russia, which had been among the leaders in the two prior years of the survey’s history, fell out of the rankings for the first time.

The city and country questions were part of a larger survey, the Ninth Annual CyberSource Fraud Survey, commissioned by CyberSource Corporation and undertaken by Mindwave Research. The survey was fielded September 13, 2007 through October 1, 2007 and yielded 318 qualified and complete responses from U.S. and Canadian eCommerce merchants. The sample was drawn from a database of companies involved in electronic commerce activities.

Originally posted on January 28, 2008 @ 2:58 pm

Support.com launches online PC HealthCheck for consumers

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Support.com announced the addition of PC HealthCheck to its roster of services. PC HealthCheck takes a remote scan over the Internet of a consumer’s PC and accesses the performance, security and overall system. Upon pinpointing key concerns, technicians can immediately help consumers resolve those issues with support.com’s lineup of remote repair services such as System TuneUp and Virus and Spyware Removal.

PC HealthCheck is recommended every 90 days, to eliminate future problems that may cause consumer’s PC to shut down or operate at a snail’s pace. The program is ideal for consumers and small businesses that want to ensure their computers are in top shape to handle everyday tasks, important deadlines and frequent family/business communication.

Originally posted on January 26, 2008 @ 11:43 pm

Fake Mac hack attack backfires

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Do you want to know the sure-fire way to annoy your online community and smear the image of popular blogging platforms like Expression Engine and WordPress?

Well, learn from the great Macheist.com. People behind this site created a fake hacker called Malcor who “hacked” popular Apple-related sites.

To make this fictitious character believable, they asked credible sites like AppleMatters.com, iPhoneMatters.com, Glenn Wolsey, and Macapper.com to be accomplices in this well conjured gig.

Every site had this image and a message saying, “This site has been flagged for excessive Apple fanboism, and has been taken down for 24 hours.”

malcor mac hack attack

Well, initially it was intended as a joke but they underestimated the power of stupidity. This hoax has undermined the image of WordPress, Expression Engine, and hosting companies for many users perceived these companies to be vulnerable to hack attacks.

To matter matters worse, it led many Mac fanatics to believe that such anomaly exists. As for those who participated in this ridiculous joke, they have nothing much to say but sorry, sorry, sorry, and sorry.

The lesson is very simple that I find it very demeaning to point out: think before you act.

Originally posted on November 29, 2007 @ 8:00 am

Facebook to overhaul safety procedures

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901am Part of its initiatives to protect its 47 million users from online harassment and sex predators, popular social networking siteFacebook has reached an agreement with New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo to revamp its safety procedures.

Connected with this new agreement is the improved complaint process wherein Facebook must respond to all complaints related to pornography, nudity, or harassment within 24 hours and update the complainants within 72 hours.

Moreover, an Independent Safety and Security Examiner will oversee for 2 years if the social networking site complies with the agreement.

“I applaud Facebook for addressing my office’s concerns about the site’s representation that they provided a safe environment and an expeditious complaint review process. I believe our agreement will provide additional confidence to young people and parents alike and give Facebook a competitive advantage in the marketplace for setting a new standard for safety,” said Cuomo in a news release.

Originally posted on October 17, 2007 @ 8:00 am

Global spam levels reached an all-time high of 95% of all emails

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Commtouch has released its Email Threats Trend Report for the third quarter of 2007 (pdf file), based on the automated analysis of billions of email messages weekly. The report examines the appearance of new kinds of attachment spam such as PDF spam and Excel spam together with the decline of image spam, as well as the growing threat of innocent appearing spam containing links to malicious web sites.

According to this report, global spam levels reached an all-time high of 95% of all emails at its peak during the quarter. PDF Spam represented 10-15% of all spam in early July and then dropped significantly, however a steady stream of PDF spam is still being maintained at 3-5% of all spam messages. Moreover, pharmaceuticals and sexual enhancers were the most popular spam topics, at 30% and 23%, respectively.

One technique which reached a new high during the quarter was innocent-appearing spam messages that contained hyperlinks to malware-sites. Several blended spam attacks of this type focused on leisure-time activities, such as sports and video games. Messages invited consumers to download “fun” software such as NFL game-tracking and video games from what appeared to be legitimate websites.

Spammers experimented with several new techniques to slip past anti-spam engines and into inboxes throughout the quarter. For example, they disguised messages in PDF, Excel, and other popular file formats. This simple trick fools many anti-spam technologies and end users alike, whose guards may be down when they see the popular file attachment ending.

Originally posted on October 16, 2007 @ 9:30 am