E-crime becoming more professional
A new security report claims that organized criminals are increasingly attacking online social communities such as myspace as well as online computer games.
Personal information collected in such websites as myspace is used by criminals to create personalized e-mails, which have a bigger chance to be taken seriously by users than normal spam mail. This is a method for making users download malicious software on their systems or surf to a phishing website.
The criminal can, for example make a reference to some activities that the recipient has been doing or his interests, thus making the spam-mail seem authentic or at least more authentic than the usual spam.
The professionalism and commercialization of e-crime has increased, a fact that can also be seen true because of the complex ‘toolkits’ criminals use to build multiple phishing sites at a time, as well as the use of Mass Multiplayer Online Game accounts to launder money.
The trade of virtual worlds is around $10 million each year and every account can make multiple transactions, therefore it is nearly impossible to find the real source of funds once the money is withdrawn.
Credit card details, around 85% of which come from US banks, are still the most usual type of personal information advertised on illegal websites.
The number of phishing messages has increased by 18% and the number of bots has decreased by 17% (29% based in China).
Some other statistics include Internet Explorer as the most compromised web browser (39 of 105 vulnerabilities) and The Education sector as the most compromised sector with 30% data breaches that could lead to identity theft. Vulnerabilities associated with web-based plug-ins have increased by 74%.
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