fraud

Apple reporter Tom Krazit drops by the studio to talk about how Apple's iPhone, largely ignored by IT departments in its first generation, is now making its way into more and more companies' tech arsenal.

Also in this podcast: Sun Microsystems announces it's laying off up to 6,000 employees; Barack Obama says he'll post his weekly public addresses to YouTube; eBay shuts down inauguration ticket scams; and Netflix's CEO dreams of radical change in the realm of home TVs.

Today's stories:

Businesses warming up to the iPhone

Sun chops heads: Can it get any respect?… Read more

One week after a breached corporate health care company refused to pay extortionists, the criminals now are seeking money from the corporate clients whose employee data might have been exposed.

St. Louis-based Express Scripts said on Tuesday that a limited number of its clients--which include government agencies, unions, and employers--have received letters threatening to expose the personal information of its members. The company said the letters sent to its clients were similar to the original extortion threat it received in October.

The company also said it was establishing a reward totaling $1 million to anyone providing information that results in … Read more

The customer database of Express Scripts, a company used by employer health care services to provide prescription medicine by mail, has been breached. In a twist, the company said it learned of the breach in "a letter from an unknown person or persons trying to extort money from the company."

The company posted details on its Web site Thursday. The letter, received in October, threatened to reveal millions of customer records--including Social Security numbers, addresses, dates of birth, and in some cases, prescription information--on the Internet if the extortion demands were not paid. The company did not disclose … Read more

You know all those hoax e-mails that arrive in your in box saying that you've won a lottery? You don't click on them, obviously, but many people do, enough to prompt Microsoft and Yahoo to form a coalition to warn consumers about the scam.

Microsoft, Yahoo, Western Union, and The African Development Bank are partnering to educate Internet users about the dangers of falling prey to the fake lottery winner e-mails.

In such scams, victims are told that they have won a lottery, often in a foreign country, and are then asked to provide their personal and financial … Read more

Words like "scumbag," "fraud," and "crook" once trailed after Henry Blodget's name anytime it came up in Silicon Valley. The budding Web-publishing mogul, who was once a superstar tech analyst before being accused of securities fraud, has spent the past five years trying to recover his credibility. Last week, his efforts may have suffered a setback.

This interview began in August, when I sent Blodget the questions. He e-mailed his answers on Wednesday, two days before Silicon Alley Insider, the technology news blog Blodget co-founded, wrote itself into a controversy. A member of … Read more

It looks like either somebody drinks a lot of coffee and talks really fast, or somebody diddled with the results of the phone recruitment feature in the Barack Obama campaign's iPhone application.

When I tried the application before 8 a.m. PDT Thursday, only 12 calls had been made, and the top-ranked caller had made 6 of them. But 30 hours later, the top caller had made 9,648 calls, according to the application.

That works out to more than five calls per minute, which means somebody would have been spending less than 12 seconds per call on average. … Read more

Debit cards and PINs are hot subjects on the criminal underground forums these days, Tom Rusin said on a recent visit to CNET. Rusin is president of North American operations at Affinion Group, a company that monitors the criminal underground for several thousand banking institutions by lurking in carder chat rooms.

"Carders" are the people who buy, sell, and trade online the credit card data stolen from phishing sites or from large data breaches at retail stores. Affinion is one of the largest identity protection companies in the world, with offices in more than a dozen countries. Over … Read more

This week Tom Rusin, president and chief executive officer of Affinion's North America operation, is Robert Vamosi's guest. His company monitors the criminal underground for several thousand banking institutions by lurking in carder chat rooms.

"Carders" are the people who buy, sell, and trade online the credit card data stolen from phishing sites or from large data breaches at retail stores. Affinion is global, with offices in more than a dozen countries. And over the years they have provided a wealth of information to the U.S. Secret Service and the FBI. A few weeks ago, … Read more

I sat down on Thursday with someone who watches the underground criminals who are trying to break into people's bank accounts and steal their money. And the picture isn't pretty.

Online fraudsters are coming up with more types of dangerous attacks and more sophisticated methods, says Uri Rivner, head of new technologies for RSA Consumer Solutions, which is owned by EMC.

I've already written about how the cybercriminals are borrowing organizational structures from the mafia and even legitimate businesses, and have further explored the threats from identity fraud. Rivner filled in some details with his assessment of how the fraudsters are operating. He talked about the "Fraud Supply Chain" in which harvesters steal the data and then sell it to people who are expert at turning the data into cash by emptying out the bank accounts.

The two sides of this e-commerce underground communicate via informal marketplaces on IRC Chat channels. They also share information on sites like "Carder's Market," where you can read industry blogs and even reviews of Trojans and other malware.

Fraudsters aren't just targeting bank customers. They are also luring victims off social networks, where they harvest sensitive private information, and online gaming sites, where they steal accomplished avatars and accounts and sell them for money, Rivner says.

Another recent trend is the blending of phishing and malware on spoof Web sites that look legitimate but prompt visitors to run an executable in order to see a video, for instance. Instead, the executable is a Trojan that can grab the sensitive data on the computer. The recent "Obama sex video" spam is an example of this. … Read more