CEO Fraudsters Hit When Using 'Reply-To' Option

Criminals who engage in fraud CEO, also known as business mail compromise, adapt to various new tactics to highlight organizations, such as using the 'reply-to' option. That claims security PhishLabs. CEO fraud is a form of cyber crime involving financial people within an organization to receive an email that appears to come from the director.

In the email is asked to urgently make a large sum of money about. The FBI have criminals in this way for 1.2 billion dollars managed to steal. At the first attack, the criminals were using free email services company or hacked accounts to send fraudulent requests. Now they're using hacked e-mail accounts from Internet company GoDaddy. These accounts are in fact easy to reproduce through phishing attacks, support the use of the 'reply-to' option and the 'identity' feature.

Through this feature simple as the sender can specify any email address. Fraudsters use this feature for composing an e-mail to from a legitimate address of the attacked organization, such as the email address of the director. Then they fill the reply-to address an e-mail address is managed by the criminals. Most e-mail clients only show the name and hide the e-mail address, so employees do not immediately see the reply-to address.

Another change in method is that the first e-mail is concise and contains no payment details. In earlier attacks was financial controller immediately sent to the bank account and amount to. Now the fraudsters exchanged several emails before the account data is transmitted. And also for the bill is the tactic changed. Foreign accounts were first used in China, for example, now the US accounts. PhishLabs advises organizations to create more awareness among the staff and spam filters first so that fraudulent emails are blocked.

Fuss About Speculative Connections Firefox

On the Internet fuss arose over a feature in Firefox for ensuring that websites load faster, but can also help to track users. Several years ago, Mozilla has developed an API (application programming interface) to "speculative connections" allows to load websites faster than expected is that the user will also open a link.

Only moving the mouse over a link ensures that a request is sent to the web server of the website. Recently, a user sketched out a scenario whereby can consider whether certain email addresses are in use. Suffice it to any e-mail address to send an e-mail with a link to a unique IPv6 address. Once the user receives the message and moves his mouse over the link or the mouse in the area with link state, Firefox will send the request and may be checked to see if the email address is still in use.

Users can take steps to disable the feature, so Mozilla late this article know. For this, users in the address bar about: config entries. Then there must be sought on network.http.speculative-parallel-limit and must be the value to 0.

Date 3.9 Million Members In Adult Dating Search Engine

This week that attackers had managed to steal a database of adult dating site Adult FriendFinder containing the personal information of 3.9 million members . The data were then made ​​public. Security expert Troy Hunt has this data now added to his " Haveibeenpwned.com "search engine.

For a variety of large data breaches that occurred in recent years, such as those from Adobe, with data from tens of millions of users were captured, Hunt decided to create a website that contains information from hacked databases. Internet users can search through this search engine or even their e-mail address is being stolen from such intrusion. The search engine now contains the details of all known hacked businesses and 183 million accounts.

The data come from burglaries at Adobe, Mail.ru , Bitcoin Security Forum, Snap Chat, Stratfor, Gawker, Forbes, Yahoo, Sony and other companies. Users can enter their email address on the website and get that message right away or they are listed in one of the stolen databases. Internet users also can sign up so they get automatically notified if their email address is listed in a stolen database that is added to the search engine in the future.

Google Loopholes In Using Secret Question

Using only a secret question to reset a forgotten password is unsafe and should be avoided, as Google sets on the basis of own research ( pdf ). Many sites still use the secret question as a way for users to access their account if they have forgotten the login details. The problem of the secret question is that attackers can try to guess the answer and so to reset the password.

Thus, an attacker with the secret question of English users "what is your favorite meal" 19.7% chance to guess which one time. The answer is "pizza". With ten attempts an attacker 24% chance the question "what is the name of your first teacher" to answer in Arabic speaking users. With the same number of attempts an attacker 21% chance the question of Spanish speakers, "What is your father's middle name," to answer. In the case of Koreans make ten attempts a success rate of 39% on the question "what city were you born" and 43% with the question of what is the favorite food.

It also showed that many users had identical answers to secret questions which are believed to be correct very safe, such as "what is your phone number" and "what is your airmiles number". In this case it was found that 37% of people intentionally wrong information by filling out the idea that this makes the answer more difficult to guess. The research, which Google hundreds of millions of secret questions and answers analyzed, also shows that 40% of English speaking users the answer to the secret question no longer know if they have to fill.

Unfit

According to the researchers, the study shows that the secret question really is unfit to reset passwords and websites as well as users should think carefully whether they want to use secret questions. Google says that the secret question not be used as a standalone way to reset passwords. Furthermore, should website owners use other authentication methods, such as SMS codes or a second email address. "That is both safer and easier to use," concludes Elie Bursztein Google.