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DHL Spoofed, NYPD Goofed, And Cybercrook Runs For Office
SecurityProNews
Staff Writer
2009-03-05
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Forget the Sopranos. In the 21st Century, the mafia is digital. But just like the old days, they focus on the shipping industry, corruption inside law enforcement, and political implantations.
 | | DHL Spoofed, NYPD Goofed, And Cybercrook Runs For Office |  |
DHL Spoofed
Shipping and delivery companies have become a major target of Internet criminals lately. UPS, FedEx, Western Union have all been targeted, either by spoof spam emails to customers or spoofing tracking pages themselves.
DHL is the latest target. Trend Micro has identified a spoof website that appears to be a DHL customer log-in page. Unsuspecting customers might provide their email addresses, their passwords, and their DHL account numbers.
It's easy to see why targeting shipping companies would be attractive to an online mafia-it beats knocking off trucks. In addition to valuable, phished data, orders could be tracked and intercepted, and user accounts could be hijacked for illegal shipments.
Proceed with caution and be sure to check webpage URLs.
NYPD Goofed
The New York Police Department showed it's still firmly stuck in the late 20th century. After a civilian employee swiped eight tapes containing the Social Security numbers and direct deposit information of 80,000 retired and currently employed cops, the NYPD had to send out embarrassing notice of the breach.
The tapes were stored at a backup data warehouse on Staten Island, but here is the big faux pas on the part of New York's finest cop data administrators: none of the information was encrypted, highly boosting the value of the information.
"This is 101 IT security as far as payroll and allied systems are concerned," said Michael Callahan, SVP of Credant Technologies. "Eight backup tapes with heavily encrypted data on them have a resale value measured in tens of dollars, whereas, with 80,000 identity theft kits on them in readable format, the value starts to skyrocket into hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars category."
Ukrainian Craziness
Think your politicians are corrupt? You could live in the Ukraine, where a convicted cybercriminal is the leader of the Internet Party of the Ukraine. Dmitry Golubov, aka Script, served time in prison for running CarderPlanet, a website "mecca" for trading credit card numbers and identities. His buddies convinced a judge to release him based on not strong enough evidence.
About the Author:
SecurityProNews is a daily online and email publication focusing on internet security issues.
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