Nigeria’s anti-corruption police have shut down 800 scam websites and busted 18 syndicates of email fraudsters. “Over 800 fraudulent e-mail addresses have been identified and shut down,” Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) boss Farida Waziri said. “There have been 18 arrests of high profile syndicates operating cyber-crime organisations,” she added.
Microsoft lends a hand
In a statement EFCC, which has previously relied on raiding cyber cafes and complaints from the public to clampdown on the crime, said it has now adopted smart technology working in conjunction with Microsoft, to track down fraudulent emails. The operation, dubbed “Eagle Claw” should be able to forewarn around a quarter of million potential victims when fully implemented within the next six months.
Nigeria has a history of email fraud
Nigeria has the notorious reputation of being the center of email fraudsters. Spanish police arrested 23 people in March, mainly Nigerians, suspected of running an email and letter scam thought to have defrauded over 150 people in the United States and Europe. The gang sent out thousands letters every day to potential prey. Victims were swindled of their money when asked to pay processing fees or supply their bank account details into which non-existent funds were promised to be transferred. Some of the email fraudsters hacked into private email accounts of prominent personalities and sent e-mails to their contacts claiming to be stranded and asking for emergency cash.
How you can prevent email attacks
Mailprotector’s services help prevent many of these types of email scams. Our services are great for keeping spam, viruses, Trojans, phishing and other email-borne malware and attacks from reaching your user’s inbox. Contact us today to learn more.
According to numerous recent reports Hotmail users have had their login credentials stolen.
About 10,000 users had their user credentials swiped in this latest phishing attack and millions more have been warned they could be at risk. Cyber-scammers set up a fake Hotmail login page that users entered their information.
Hotmail not alone
Not only did Hotmail users get cyber-mugged but Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, AOL, Comcast and Earthlink account holders were targeted, too. A spokesman for Google said, ‘We recently became aware of an industry-wide phishing scheme through which hackers gained user credentials for web-based mail accounts including Gmail account. As soon as we learned of the attack, we forced password resets on the affected accounts. We will continue to force password resets on additional accounts when we become aware of them.’
Not a breach, but a scam
Google stressed that the scam was ‘not a breach of Gmail security’ but rather ‘a scam to get users to give away their personal information to hackers’.
Unrest remains among the affected
Account logins had been posted online. They were taken down soon after that discovery. However, users now fear they may have had personal information (credit cards, bank account numbers, etc.) taken from their accounts as a result of their user credentials being publicly posted. Police are advising affected account holders to pay close attention to their credit card and banking accounts for any unauthorized activity.
To help protect yourself from falling prey to phishing scams:
- Change passwords frequently (every 30 days to 90 days).
- Use “strong” passwords: include upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers and characters randomly dispersed within the password.
- Don’t use the same password for your email account as you do for other online accounts. Many online accounts use your email address as the user name.
- Never click through any warnings your browser may raise about certificates.
- Be wary of pop-up security warnings.
- Be wary of mispelled words, poor grammar, blurry graphics on the web site as these items may indicate a phishing site.
- Implement email security that protects against spam, phishing, malware and other email-borne attacks.
No sign of a cool down for phishing
These phishing attacks will only continue due to the hackers success stealing thousands of email account user credentials. “Hotmail” now conjures up a completely different connotation.
Yesterday, Google unveiled a preview of their new search engine improvements, codenamed “Caffeine”. You can take it for a spin yourself here (http://www2.sandbox.google.com/). The Google team promises the new search tool will improve the speed, accuracy, size, and comprehensiveness of Google search.
So why would Google bother with a big update to their search technology? They are already dominating the search engine industry. From a developers perspective, I think there are a couple key principles we can learn from Google on this.
Never Be Satisfied
First, never be satisfied that your system is as good as it can possibly be. There is always room for improvement. Matt Cutts, a software engineer at Google, jokes that the half life of code at Google is six months. Meaning “that you can write some code and when you circle back around in six months, about half of that code has been replaced with better abstractions or cleaner infrastructure.” I love this. Most people stop at the “If it ain’t broke, then don’t try to fix it” level of quality, but I prefer to think in terms of “Just because it is working doesn’t mean that we can’t make it better.” Google is always looking for ways to make their product better, even though they are already the best in their industry.
Improving Your Product From The Inside Out
Second, not all improvements are about new bells and whistles and fancy looking user interfaces. Sometimes the best thing a company can do to improve their product is focus on the core of that system and improve it from the inside out. This is what Google is doing with the “Caffeine” release. If you set the sandbox version next to the current live version of Google, you will hardly be able to notice a different to the interface. Matt Cutts himself admits, “The Caffeine update isn’t about making some UI changes here or there. Currently, even power users won’t notice much of a difference at all. This update is primarily under the hood: we’re rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure.” Google is improving their product from the inside out.
Some are speculating that this update has something to do with the recent release of Bing.com from Microsoft. Perhaps it does, but you really have to give Google credit for staying focused on what it does best, being a search engine, and continuing to improve that first.
Today we’re going to look at our three smart-phones and how they perform as well…a phone. For me, this is the most important category since I want a phone in order to talk to other people. For some, this one is down the list but tops in my book.
The winner by a hair in the phone category is:
Window’s Mobile (Blackjack I & II).
Here’s how it all went down:
Call Quality:
The overall call quality of the Blackjack I and II was great. I never had dropped calls or static, always heard the other party well and basically could forget I was using a device and just talk.
I would have to say the iPhone is a close second. The only factor that took it down slightly is that sometimes I have trouble positioning the listening speaker at the right spot on my ear so I have a little trouble hearing the caller.
The BlackBerry was horrid. On my first device I would answer calls to dead air even though the caller could hear me. Or, as I was talking the earpiece would develop static and go dead while the other party could still hear me. If I called them back, no problem. AT&T did switch out the unit and the second was a little better, but I still experienced an unusual number of dropped calls.
Dialing:
This is probably one of the most important aspects of the phone after the calling issue is settled. This is also why I chose Window’s Mobile as my favorite. WM has the easiest and most intuitive dialing interface. As I would start to dial a number/name the display would populate with matches from my contact list and winnow the list down as I continued until I was ready to scroll to the name and select the number. A nice feature was that it prioritized the list with the most recent inbound/outbound calls. It just always seemed that whomever I wanted to call was no more than about three buttons away.
The iPhone is close but seems to take longer to look up and dial a number. First, since there is no dedicated keypad you have to activate the device, unlock it, click home screen and click phone. Then click keypad, contacts , etc. Or you can scroll to the search function (which we’ll talk about later this week) from the main screen. I keep my phone screen on “Recent” which handles most of my direct calling fairly well. For a phone there are a bit too many clicks to get to the number. What I’ve found though is that I use the voice dialing about 80% of the time with excellent accuracy. I don’t have to look down at the phone, keep my eyes on the road and it is RARELY wrong. Without this feature I would have serious reservations about the iPhone as a well designed mobile phone.
Finally, the BlackBerry. Honestly, I don’t know how anyone uses it. I’ve almost buried myself under more 18-wheelers trying to call someone on this phone. As you begin to type, it too brings up a list of contacts but does NOT prioritize them. You end up typing almost the whole name or scrolling through the list. But wait, it gets worse. When you start scrolling, the list dynamically expands and collapses the calling options for each contact as you pass the name. So, you can’t look up at the road and look back down at the screen in the same spot to find where you left off because it is changing the line position of each contact around. The dialing on the BlackBerry was so bad I finally found myself just dialing in the whole number each time.
So, there you have it in the Phone category. Of course there are many more features that I could have delved into, but those are the critical basics. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s run-down in the Personal and Productivity Manager category.
by Ben Hathaway on June 25, 2009
The Security Essentials Pack is Microsoft’s most recent effort to improve the security of their operating system. This is Microsoft’s replacement for the Windows Live OneCare software which was discontinued months ago. And while the OneCare software was fairly cheap, the Security Essentials Pack is free. The features will include key security tasks such as fighting viruses, rootkits and other malware. However, it will not provide any firewall or spam protection.
Lets hope the performance of the Security Essentials Pack is better than OneCare. While OneCare might have been protecting your computer, it also performed so poorly that you could definitely tell that it was there. Security software like this should be lightweight enough that you can set it up and forget that it is even there and it just does its job.
Microsoft is also doing the right thing with the Security Essentials Pack by allowing it to tap into the potential of cloud-base services. Most security software applications are stuck in the days of periodically downloading updated virus definitions. Microsoft Security Essentials will share information with the cloud-based Microsoft Dynamic Signature Service which should allow the software to always be aware of the latest threats as well as whitelist information in order to prevent false positives. They are not the first antivirus software to utilize the cloud but it is certainly a welcomed addition to any security software that relies on being up-to-date in order to be fully effective.
