Cyber-criminal

18 Nigerian Spammers Headed for the Slammer

Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) says that their “Operation Eagle Claw” has so far seen members of 18 syndicates arrested and 800 scam websites shut down. The chairman of the anti-scam force, Mrs. Farida Waziri said:

We expect that Eagle Claw as conceived will be 100% operational within six months and at full capacity, it will take Nigeria out of the top 10 list of countries with the highest incidence of fraudulent e-mails.

At the moment, Eagle Claw has delivered the following results:

Over 800 fraudulent e-mail addresses have been identified and shut down. The EFCC is fine tuning security modalities with Microsoft and upon full deployment, the capacity to take down fraudulent e-mails will increase to 5,000 monthly. Further it is projected that advisory mails to be sent to victims and potential victims will be about 230,000 monthly.

There have been 18 arrests of high profile syndicates operating cyber crime organizations.

When it [Eagle Claw] is fully deployed, it will afford the EFCC the option of either monitoring or shutting down all fraudulent email addresses. The EFCC would also have identified victims and potential victims and advised them that their email has been compromised.

Does this mean we won’t be getting anymore of those touchy-feely emails from Mrs. Farzad Arubi (or whatever bogus names they use these days) who really needs our help to move a million dollars from her late (murdered) husband’s estate?

Not likely, but it’s good see some of the perpetrators taking it on the chin.

PANDALABS REVEALS EXPONENTIAL GROWTH IN ROGUEWARE

Rogueware? The names just keep coming. It’s another name for Scareware, that stuff designed to cause shock, anxiety, or the perception of a threat, generally directed at an unsuspecting user. The end result is to steal money from PC users by luring them into paying to remove nonexistent threats. Disturbing statistics point out why this stuff won’t go away:

• Cybercriminals are earning approximately $34 million per month through rogueware attacks
• Approximately 35 million computers are newly infected with rogueware each month
• Rogueware is being distributed through Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg and targeted BlackHat SEO attacks
• Research confirms that majority of cybercriminals operate from Eastern Europe

PandaLabs, Panda Security’s malware analysis and detection laboratory, announced yesterday that they’ve made a multi-year study available that examines the proliferation of rogueware into the overall cybercriminal economy. The report, “The Business of Rogueware,” by PandaLabs researchers, Luis Corrons and Sean-Paul Correll, reviews the various forms of rogueware that have been created, and displays how this new class of malware has become an instrumental player in the overall cybercriminal economy. The study also provides in depth analysis on the increasingly sophisticated social engineering techniques used by cybercriminals to distribute rogueware via Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Google.

It’s very clear the whole landscape has changed from a vandal model to a profit model. It used to be that the cyber-vandals trashed your hard drive and wrecked your website; now, cyber-criminals use tactics to steal your identity and extort money from you. The damage is no less costly, it has just increased in both the intensity of emotional pain and amount of financial loss. The difference is that cyber-vandals didn’t have a payday—cyber-criminals do.

And people ask me why I’m adamant about cyber-security…