I noticed today that the email address we have set up to take inquires and message regarding our twitter account has been hit with a few spam emails that clearly phishing emails. I thought I would share them here for your amusement and enjoyment. Please do NOT click on any links or visit these websites as they main contain harmful content. If you receive emails such as these do not click on any links or download, preview or click on any attachments. Mark them as junk or spam in your mail and delete. If you wish, you may report them to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center at ic3.gov

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From: HSBC Support Holding plc [helpdesk@hsbc.co.uk]

Subject: YOUR ONLINE ACCOUNT HAS BEEN DEACTIVATED

Dear customer:

After the week verification of your online activity we have determined to suspend your online account.

Your online account has been deactivated (reason: suspicious activity on this account).

Even if your online services has been disabled, the data may still be available for up to 10 days, after which it will be deleted.

If you feel this deactivation is in error, please fill the active contact customer form as soon as possible at the next link: http://www.hsbc.co.uk.hsbc-deactivated.com/1/2/

Thank you,

HSBC Support Holding plc

http://www.hsbc.co.uk

helpdesk@hsbc.co.uk

Toll-Free: 08457 400 004

***

From: HM Revenue & Customs [help.desk@hmrc.notify-online.co.uk]

Subject: HM Revenue & Customs [help.desk@hmrc.notify-online.co.uk]

NOTE: There is an attachment called “attached_form.pdf.html” 24KB

TAX RETURN FOR THE YEAR 2009

RECALCULATION OF YOUR TAX REFUND

HMRC 2008-2009

LOCAL OFFICE No. 3819

TAX CREDIT OFFICER: David Craig

TAX REFUND ID NUMBER: 381716209

REFUND AMOUNT: 327.54 GBP

Dear Applicant,

I am sending this email to announce: After the last annual calculation of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of 327.54 GBP

You have attached the tax return form with the TAX REFUND NUMBER ID: 381716209, complete the tax return form attached to this message.

After completing the form, please submit the form by clicking the SUBMIT button on form and allow us 5-9 business days in order to process it.

Our head office address can be found on our web site at http://www.hmrc.co.uk/

Sincerely,

David Craig

HMRC Tax Credit Office

Preston

PR1 0SB

http://www.hmrc.co.uk/

ID Experts on KATU News:

A few news stories have been circulating about the looming identity theft threat to couples who have decided to tie the knot. Thieves prey on our deepest and strongest emotions, and two people madly in love and about to take the plunge are certainly full of emotions and stress. Stress makes us more apt to decide quickly, without thinking the situation through. The sense of relief we feel may encourage us to accept an offer that seems “too good to be true” when we might otherwise hesitate. Our families and friends may also be targeted, for much the same reasons. Think like a thief- on average weddings cost over $20,000 and guest gifts range between $50-150 each. That places a rather large bulls-eye on anyone involved. Here is just a small list of the kinds of scams that are lurking out there:

• Fake vendors- these are identity thieves or card frauders. They are online, at bridal shows, and call individuals out of the blue. You may be even approaching them for a genuine service advertised in the classifieds or a bridal magazine, or it may be a “sweepstakes”. As part of the “contract” or “application” you answer personal questions in great detail or provide a credit card number that is later used to defraud you.

• Fraud vendors- this category is not technically identity theft, but still leaves you stung. Often you are promised a “free” sample and hand over your credit card for shipping and handling, and then find yourself with outrageous charges. Vendors take a deposit for renting you an item as pictured on their site, and when the big day comes, nothing arrives or what arrives bears little resemblance to the model. Sweepstakes and Giveaways should be especially scrutinized if you get a call and you “won” – there may be strings attached.

• Crooks- these people take advantage of the fact you share so much about your event. They may rob your house while you’re exchanging rings, or wait until you’re away on honeymoon. While everyone at the reception is distracted, they snatch purses or sneak into hotel rooms. Honeymooners are easily targeted by pickpockets, camera snatchers, and hustlers.

• Disappearing act- this can be anything from a deposit you paid disappearing from the books to a company suddenly going bankrupt. Bankruptcies are up 47% from last year, so this is a big concern. While insurance can help protect you, it is important to purchase coverage carefully.

• Malware – There are tons of “free” applications out there to help out couples. Cost calculators, dress design software, websites, countdown clocks, reminders, calendars, the list goes on… Then there are the flash animations and videos of weddings, decorations, crafts, flowers and more. However, some of these may contain harmful code that could harvest your information and place you at risk for identity theft and fraud.

• Robocalls and junk mail – While shopping around online or in person, you’re often asked to leave your contact information. This can result in an increase in junk mail offers and robocalls. Some of these are likely phishing attempts, and are cleverly disguised. Another risk with increased junk mail is the possibility of mail theft going unnoticed for a longer period of time. Pre-approved credit card offers may inflate your mailbox, also increasing your risk of fraud.

• “In distress” scam- this is commonly used while a couple is on honeymoon, but can strike at any time. Fraudsters may call, email, or take over your email or social networking accounts to contact your friends and family claiming to need emergency money. Excuses range from medical emergencies, to being kidnapped. Often they have “been robbed” and need the money to get home. The rest is ALWAYS to wire money or send Western Union.

• YOU – of all the threats, YOU might be your own worst enemy. Many couples have wedding announcements; send emails, e-vites, wedding websites, social networking pages, online gift registries with their personal information, personal details, family details, and wedding, reception and honeymoon specifics available to the public at large. Brides and grooms alike tend to become excited and may share greater detail about themselves, their partners and the event with coworkers and friends… and florists, photographers, DJs (or anyone else who will listen).

With a few minor changes and some awareness, you can still have all the bells and whistles to your big day while keeping your friends, family and your identity safe.

• Assume the numbers and addresses you are using to contact vendors, get quotes, order catalogs are going to be stolen, traded and sold over and over. Set up a PO Box and a separate number to use for your contact information.

• Contact the Better Business Bureau in your area about any vendor, sweepstakes, or service you are going to fork over a large amount of money to, or that you are unfamiliar with. Do this before you provide them any personal or contact information.

• Always assume that calls you receive are compromised and never reveal any personal information. You may trust calls you initiate to a trusted business more, but still exercise caution.

• Read ALL fine print carefully. TWICE.

• Keep all receipts; require everything in writing and document, document, document. Go over all your credit card and bank statements monthly and notify your financial institution right away if you notice any unusual activity.

• Quarantine. Don’t use the same passwords or email account for your social networking sites, registry, and wedding webpage. You should never attach your “trusted” email account you have been using to communicate with your friends and family to another site. A compromise of a social networking site can easily lead to an email compromise, and makes it easier for fraudsters to contact your entire address book for money. If your quarantined email is hacked and messages sent to all your friends, they should be more cautious since it is a different email than they are used to communicating with you. This will buy you enough time that you can then use your “trusted” email account to notify them all of the fraud (or better yet- call them!).

• Never send money Western Union- this is one of the few ways you can send money and never get it back. Provide contact information to their nearest consulate if you are met with this scam online.

• Limit access to personal information- If you are going to list the details of your big day and honeymoon, look for websites that allow you to create a wedding website for friends only, or that is password protected so you can control who has access.

• Be careful of accidentally revealing personal information like your mother’s maiden name (which may be derived from guest lists or online friend list on social networking sites) and your date or place of birth. Also, you will be asked a lot of questions so people can “get to know you” before your big day- make sure none of these questions and answers correspond to the security questions of any account you have. Go through each online account and determine what questions are asked if you click “I forgot my password”. You may wish to change those answers.

• Find gift registries that allow you to control privacy, and insist on revealing as little about yourself as possible. Gift registries often offer a disturbing amount of detail about you, and often are generally open to the public.

Check your credit reports regularly with www.annualcreditreport.com or by calling 1-877-322-8228.  If you do experiance fraud or a scam, report it to your Better Business Bureau and the FTC and place fraud alerts with the major credit bureaus.

Technology Review, published by MIT, has an article that is highlighting a personal crusade of mine. Your secret questions are not all that secret! I’ve said many times that most security questions are answered truthfully, and most of those are easily obtained or guessed. What town you grew up in, what high school you attended, what your pet’s name is are all probably either in public record or on your own profile page somewhere. Several chain-letter-type surveys that ask you to answer your teacher’s name and the street you grew up on in order to provide you with a “Rock Star” name are often a clever scam to get people to reveal the answers to these questions. From there, they only have to click on the “I forgot my password” link on email or websites to gain access to your accounts, profiles, identity and contact list. They may start contacting users in your address book, trying to scam money or personal information- creating a nightmare of fraudulent activity and impersonations to try to resolve.

Sarah Palin’s hacker gained access to her account in this way. As a public figure, much was on Wikipedia and other websites about her life which together provided the answers to her security questions. The lesson to learn here is that our LinkedIn profiles, business contacts and networking efforts may appear enticing to identity thief. Researches from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University show that the secret questions are typically insecure. “In a study involving 130 people, the researchers found that 28 percent of the people who knew and were trusted by the study’s participants could guess the correct answers to the participant’s secret questions. Even people not trusted by the participant still had a 17 percent chance of guessing the correct answer to a secret question.”

More alarming:

The least-secure questions are simple ones whose answers can be guessed with no existing knowledge of the subject, the researchers say. For example, the answers to the questions “What is your favorite town?” and “What is your favorite sports team?” were relatively easy for participants to guess. All told, 30 percent and 57 percent of the correct answers, respectively, appeared in the top-five list of guesses.

But answers that require only a little personal knowledge to guess should also be considered unsafe, the researchers warn. Of people that participants would not trust with their password, 45 percent could still answer a question about where they were born, and 40 percent could correctly give their pet’s name, the researchers found.

Remember, the easier it is for you to remember- the easier you make it for others to guess. The most secure method would be to create your own password for each security question, with special characters and number. However, realistically, most people will have to sacrifice a little security for convenience. I have always recommended coming up with your own secret question plan. When asked about your pet, give your best friend’s middle name. When asked about the town you grew up in, always answer with your shoe size and so on. This should cut down on the likelihood of a successful attack.

You’re in the scene- you’ve got the Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts active and updated. You juggle to remember which friend requests have been added where, and then you suddenly decide to sign up for another social media site such as Yelp, Plaxo, Ning, FriendFeed, Orkut, or iLike. What a pain to add all those friends all over again! Then you see a advertisement for a wonderful service provided by the company- all you have to do is provide your email username and password, and all your friends will be automatically added to your social network. Sounds great, right?

Wrong. This leaves the door wide open for numerous types of fraud. Most people do not take the security precaution of creating different user names and passwords for the sites they visit. They may be handing over their address books, and financial and email accounts. You must also consider that a large database of user names and passwords are VERY attractive to potential hackers and identity thieves, and is much more likely to be targeted than individual accounts.

As reported on TechRadar, Twitter’s API lead Alex Payne said “We’ve always advised users to only give their passwords to websites they feel they can trust. Any website runs the risk of compromise, so giving out your credentials is always a gamble. There’s little risk in using a desktop Twitter client, but we’ve cautioned users against handing out their passwords to web-based services that are higher-value targets to attackers.”

Even if you trust the service not to delve into your personal information, you are providing a third party website with security information. A habit that identity theft and security professionals have been trying to break for years. As handing out your security information from one site to another site becomes commonplace, the easier it will become to convince users to continue the practice. As Jeremy Keith, technical director of user experience consultancy Clearleft points out, “…it teaches people how to be phished.”

There is always a security trade-off for convenience. Before you click on that free download, try the new service, or ask a computer to remember your password ask yourself- Is this worth it? Is the increased risk of attack and theft worth the convenience I am trading it for? Remember to use different usernames and passwords for your accounts, so that any single compromise does not result in total loss of your personal and finacial information. Never provide account information on a third party site, and be cautious of any requests for password or account information by email, website or phone.

PC World reports that On Wednesday, an anonymous hacker going by the name of Hacker Croll posted 13 screenshots to a French online discussion forum, apparently captured while logged into the Twitter account of Jason Goldman, a director of product management with Twitter. This hack was confirmed Thursday by Twitter CEO Biz Stone. The initial investigation revealed that at least 10 accounts were viewed during this hack, possible compromising phone numbers, email addresses and more.

How was this hack possible? Well, if I haven’t emphasized enough the need to change your security questions, this should hammer it home. The hacker was able to gain access through the administrator’s Yahoo! account by guessing at his security questions. Once in his Yahoo! mail account, all her had to do is request his password to be emailed to the account. Security questions are the prompts you receive when you click “I forgot my password” button. They have been the focus of many attacks and breaches, since many times they are easily guessed answers or publicly available information (such as the high school you went to, the town you grew up in, and so forth).

This is the second time someone has hacked into the support staff at Twitter, the first was in January. During the attack in January, it was reported that the password was a word found in the dictionary with no special characters or numbers. A password that would be easily guessed: happiness. Highlighting the problem with third parties who handle your information carelessly. You may take all the precautions to protect your information, but it only takes one mistake by someone else at a company to expose your information.

While some of the recent security problems that Twitter has experianced are related to technology attacks, such as worms and viruses- this highlights the ongoing problem of social engineering attacks. Knowledge is power, and most people would be surprised to find out what information is available to the public. Further, most people are unaware of the amount of information that they place on thier profiles that can be used to conduct these kinds of attacks. Limiting the amount of personal information available by using the privacy setting is important. It is equally important to change the answers to your security questions- make sure the answers are ones you would remember, but no one else who knew the “right” answer could get it. When asked about your pet’s name, pick your best friend’s middle name. When asked about the town you grew up in, answer with the last four digits of your phone number- whatever it takes to make it more difficult to obtain access to your accounts.

Conficker has been making headlines during its attack on Windows-based PCs, attacking over 9 million PCs to date. It even prompted a $250,000 reward from Microsoft for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the worm’s creators. Once your computer is infected, several actions take place: administrator passwords are cracked, access to security websites and automatic updates are shut down, recently saved documents are erased, and possible keylogging software installed.

The Department of Homeland security released this article to address concerns. US-CERT recommends that Windows Operating Systems users apply Microsoft security patch MS08-067 (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS08-067.mspx) as quickly as possible to help protect themselves from the worm.

Instructions, support and more information on how to manually remove a Conficker/Downadup infection from a system have been published by major security vendors. Each of these vendors offers free tools that can verify the presence of a Conficker/Downadup infection and remove the worm:

Symantec:
http://www.symantec.com/business/security_response/writeup.jsp?docid=2009-011316-0247-99

Microsoft:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/962007
http://www.microsoft.com/protect/computer/viruses/worms/conficker.mspx

Home users may also call Microsoft PC Safety hotline at 1-866-PCSAFETY, for assistance.

McAfee:
http://www.mcafee.com/us/threat_center/default.asp

US-CERT encourages users to prevent a Conficker/Downadup infection by ensuring all systems have the MS08-067 patch, disabling AutoRun functionality (see http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/techalerts/TA09-020A.html), and maintaining up-to-date anti-virus software.

In addition, US-CERT recommends that computer users and administrators implement the following preparedness measures to protect themselves against this vulnerability, and also from future vulnerabilities:

• Keep up-to-date on security patches and fixes for your operating system. The easiest way to do this is to set your system to receive automatic updates, which will ensure you automatically receive security updates issued by Microsoft. If your system does not allow automatic updates, we recommend that you manually install the Microsoft security patch today through Microsoft Update at http://update.microsoft.com/microsoftupdate
• Install anti-virus and anti-spyware software and keep them up-to-date
• Enable a firewall which will help block attacks before they can get into your computer

To access the alerts for this vulnerability and for additional information on cyber security tips and practices, please visit www.us-cert.gov.

by Doug Pollack

This week President Bush signed into law the Identity Theft Enforcement and Restitution Act of 2008.  As reported in the Washington Post, this law will:

“make it easier for prosecutors to go after cybercrooks, while ensuring that identity theft victims are compensated for their time and trouble when convicted identity thieves are forced to cough up ill-gotten gains.”

It can take the victim of ID crime hundreds of hours to restore themselves to pre-theft condition. This law enables them to be compensated for this time at a level:

“equal to the value of the time reasonably spent by the victim in an attempt to remediate the intended or actual harm incurred by the victim from the offense.”

The FBI has set up a clearinghouse for addressing cybercrime complaints called the Internet Crime Complaint Center. It works closely with a range of law enforcement agencies and private sector organizations.

by Doug Pollack

We all hear about how more and more identity theft is now being done with the internet. What you don’t hear as much about is how an increasing percentage of US-based identity theft is perpetrated by organized crime overseas.

A recent FBI press release titled “38 Individuals in US and Romania Charged in Two Related Cases of Computer Fraud Involving International Organized Crime” describes a frightening phishing scheme that:

“uses the Internet to target large numbers of unwary individuals, using fraud and deceit to obtain private personal and financial information such as names, addresses, bank account numbers, credit card numbers and Social Security numbers.  Phishing schemes often work by sending out large numbers of counterfeit e-mail messages, which are made to appear as if they originated from legitimate banks, financial institutions or other companies.”

The level of organization of this criminal enterprise and effectiveness of their efforts is remarkable.  According to the indictment:

“The Romania-based members of the enterprise obtained thousands of credit and debit card accounts and related personal information by phishing, with more than 1.3 million spam emails sent in one phishing attack.  Once directed to a bogus site, victims were then prompted at those sites to enter access device and personal information.  The Romanian “suppliers” collected the victims’ information and sent the data to U.S.-based “cashiers” via Internet “chat” messages.  The domestic cashiers used hardware called encoders to record the fraudulently obtained information onto the magnetic strips on the back of credit and debit cards, and similar cards such as hotel keys.  Cashiers then directed “runners” to test the fraudulent cards by checking balances or withdrawing small amounts of money at ATMs.  The cards that were successfully tested, known as “cashable” cards, were used to withdraw money from ATMs or point of sale terminals that the cashiers had determined permitted the highest withdrawal limits.  A portion of the proceeds was then wire transferred to the supplier who had provided the access device information.”

As organized crime becomes increasingly sophisticated in using our affinity for online commerce to their advantage, we should all be extra cautious, especially in watching out for something that has become as commonplace as the phishing scam.