Security News
The Twitter accounts of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and other celebrities were briefly taken over on Wednesday, along with the accounts of various cryptocurrency businesses and affiliated executives, to promote a Bitcoin scam. Twitter also silenced verified blue-tick accounts temporarily to prevent more abuse while it got to the bottom of the kerfuffle.
You don't have to pay to vote in the US. Up until recently, you wouldn't have necessarily known that, were you to have run a Google search for how or where to vote. Such a search would have been polluted with ads like this one offering "Same-day processing" of voter registration for $129:. That ad, which directs to a site from PrivacyWall.org, is the first ad in a Google search for "Register to vote" that was run in an analysis done by watchdog Tech Transparency Project.
We care about your privacy and the protection of your domains, so we will soon be upgrading them, from basic Domain Name System to Domain Name System Security Extensions. As you probably know, DNS is short for domain name system, and it's the globally distributed database that turns server names that humans can remember, such as nakedsecurity.
Really interesting research: "An examination of the cryptocurrency pump and dump ecosystem": Abstract: The surge of interest in cryptocurrencies has been accompanied by a proliferation of fraud....
Between the second and third weeks of March 2020, email scams and phishing attacks spiked by an unprecedented 436%. Such was the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. BEC attacks represent a low percentage of email attacks by volume, but a disproportionally high percentage of overall loss to business.
We've been receiving loads of survey scam emails lately - and you probably get heaps of these, too. Many brands ask questions of that sort, and sometimes offer small rewards for people who take the trouble to fill in the survey - $5 off your next purchase, for example, or a free product of modest value with your next order.
The Miami-based cryptocurrency firm Centra Tech was built on fairy dust and paid celebrity hoo-ha, but co-founder Robert Joseph Farkas is going to be doing real time in a real prison for the $25 million initial coin offering rip-off. Centra Tech's founders included Farkas, who held different roles, such as chief marketing officer and chief operating officer.
Kenenty Hwan Kim, aka Myung Kim, 64, pleaded guilty [PDF] in a Texas court this week to one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. Using an email address very similar to Chance's, Kim asked Solid Bridge to send a $210,000 check for an invoice to an address in Washington state.
At least eight US states and the federal government have lost millions of dollars due to cybercrime scams targeting unemployment benefits and funding from the CARES Act proceeds, according to the Secret Service and the cybersecurity company Agari. Cybercriminals with Scattered Canary have taken advantage of the situation according to Peterson, who wrote that the group filed more than 80 fraudulent claims for CARES Act Economic Impact Payments and even more claims for unemployment insurance in Florida, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Washington, Wyoming and most recently Hawaii.
Facebook on Thursday said that its Messenger app will be watching behind the scenes for scammers using the smartphone communication system. Safety notices will pop up in Messenger text chats if activity taking place in the background is deemed suspicious by artificial intelligence software, according to director of privacy and safety product management Jay Sullivan.