The number of instances of serious cyber crime in the Netherlands has reached 170 so far this year, compared to last year’s 150 incidents, according to a Dutch newspaper. Elly van den Heuvel, head of the Dutch government’s emergency response team GOVCERT.NL, told Financieele Dagblad, “We are under increasing pressure because cyber crime is growing [...]
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The Metropolitan Police have confirmed that its budget for taking on cyber crime will be cut by the Home Office. Last week, The Register reported that the Police Central eCrime Unit’s (PCeU) budget would be cut by 30 percent. The new ruling coalition between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, which unseated Labour in the recent [...]
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Police in Assam, a state in northeastern India, lack the basic tools to combat cyber crime, according to a report in The Assam Tribune. The majority of police are not even familiar with basic computer usage, the article claims. “Be it having trained human resource or requisite technology to counter online crimes, the State is [...]
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Malware infected computers is a problem that effects all Internet users, as the infected machines can be strung together in botnets to launch denial of services attacks and spam campaigns. Currently, cleaning up infected computers is the sole responsibility of individual users and ISPs are often reluctant to get involved. Under a newly proposed scheme [...]
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A new study reveals spam, viruses, phishing and credit-card fraud have become serious issues for small- to medium-sized businesses in Ireland, costing approximately $300 million yearly, according to the Irish Examiner. After conducting a survey of more than 600 companies, the Irish Small & Medium Enterprises Association concluded cyber crime has become a growing problem. [...]
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With just a minimal amount of money invested, a single operator of a pornographic website can infect more than 20,000 computers with malware, according to a recent academic study presented at the Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS 2010). The researchers examined the online pornographic industry and traced significant amounts of malicious activity [...]
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Carefully crafted targeted attacks using social engineering can be extremely difficult for users to detect. However, despite the rise in the use of social engineering, most people are still receiving generic spam campaigns instead. Why? Economics provides the answer, according to a Microsoft researcher speaking at the at the WEIS 2010 workshop. “The profit is [...]
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An employee at a Bank of America call center has admitted to stealing sensitive account information and attempting to sell it, according to The Register. Brian Matty Hagen met with two undercover FBI agents posing as potential buyers and attempted to sell them names, telephone numbers, dates of birth and other information, according to court [...]
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Hackers have defrauded the New York City’s Department of Education of more than $644,000 by targeting an online bank account used to manage petty cash expenditures, according to investigators. The Department of Education’s bank account with JPMorgan Chase was supposed to have a $500 limit but, due to an oversight, any amount of funds could [...]
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Attempts to infect computers has increased more than 25 percent according to Kaspersky Lab. In the first three months of 2010, more than 327 million attempts were made to infect user computers in a variety of countries around the globe. From the previous quarter, this is an increase of 26.8 percent. “Cybercrime is being fuelled [...]
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