Phone Scammers Now Pose As Internet Service

Telephone scammers who call people at home and say that there are problems with the computer not only do more if Microsoft employees, they also pose as an employee of ISP and tell them that there are problems with the Internet connection.

These are for example a slow Internet connection that can be made ​​faster. To do victims have to download a program that telephone scammer can take control over the computer. Then there money stolen from bank accounts. This was reported by Financial Fraud Action UK. According to the organization there is an increase in the number of reported incidents of this scam.

During hear the phone call, victims that they are entitled to compensation. The scammer then asks if the victim wants to log into his bank account. However, the scammer still has access to the computer and displays a screen counterfeit bill making it look like the money is transferred. Is then transferred in the background money from the account.

In addition, the scammers ask for a transaction code, which would be needed to process the fee. In reality, this code is used to steal money from the account. To our knowledge does this scam occur only in Britain. The scam with the so-called Microsoft employees first began also in English-speaking countries, but later expanded to other countries.

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.

Update 450 Million Users Shockwave Player

More than 450 million people get from Adobe advised to install an important update for Shockwave Player within 72 hours. Shockwave, not to be confused with Flash Player is a browser plug-in, for example to play games. According to Adobe runs on more than 450 million systems.

The now discovered vulnerability allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on the computer. Visiting a hacked or malicious website is enough in this case, no further action is required. Adobe makes installing the update, then the highest priority with a time window of up to 72 hours is recommended. One problem with Shockwave is that it does not have an automatic update feature. Users will also have Adobe Shockwave Player 12.2.1.171 using the Adobe website must install to have the most recent version in which the problem is solved.

WhatsApp Collects Phone Numbers And Call Duration

WhatsApp collects phone numbers, duration of calls and other information, as researchers from the University of New Haven determined. WhatsApp, the popular chat app in the world and has over 800 million users worldwide.

Last year it was acquired by Facebook for $ 19 billion. Due to the acquisition by the social network and the large number of users, according to the researchers, is important to know how the network protocol of WhatsApp works and what forensically relevant data it contains. For the study, the researchers decided to unravel the connection between the WhatsApp program and the WhatsApp servers.

Through the network traffic, the researchers were able to identify various data, such as WhatsApp phone numbers, metadata about the call set-up and the duration of the call. They also discovered the codec used WhatsApp for calls, as well as the IP addresses of the relay servers which run the WhatsApp conversations.

"Our research shows which data can be gathered through forensic examination of WhatsApp and provides a way for others to conduct additional research on network forensics messaging apps," said researcher Ibrahim Baggili. The researchers note that decrypting the network traffic was not easy. For this it is necessary to have access to both the data on the device as the entire network traffic. The research of the researchers: "WhatsApp Network Forensics: Decrypting and Understanding WhatsApp Call Signaling Messages" is published in the journal Digital Investigation.