In Praise of Phish Fighters
FYI...
- http://blog.washingtonpost.com/secur...h_fighter.html
January 31, 2007 ~ "...February marks the 5th anniversary of CastleCops.com -- an all-volunteer led forum that has morphed from a place where people can diagnose security problems with their PCs into one of the most active phish fighting forums -- and the group is releasing some interesting data to highlight its accomplishments. The online help forum is the public face of CastleCops, but the group has made a greater impact on consumer security and privacy through its Phishing Incident Response Team (PIRT). The team shares with law enforcement real-time data that could help bring the phishers to justice, along with financial information stolen from consumers... CastleCops' PIRT began sharing its phishing data with federal law enforcement agencies in June 2006. Since then, the group has intercepted stolen data from roughly 450 distinct phishing scams. If we conservatively assume that the average credit card has a balance limit of $500 and that the average phishing scam nets about 100 victims, CastleCops has prevented more than $22 million worth of fraudulent credit card charges since the middle of last year..."
:bigthumb:
Fraudsters Declare War on Anti-Scam Services
FYI...
- http://blog.washingtonpost.com/secur...on_antisc.html
February 23, 2007 ~ "Spammers have been attacking and threatening several of the groups and individuals who have been performing some of the most important work in hobbling online scams, spam and computer viruses. The SANS Internet Storm Center on Thursday found a piece of malicious code (called "sans.exe") designed to update a group of several thousand infected computers that SANS has been monitoring. The code includes text strings that suggest an attack on the center if two of its crime fighters don't stop interfering with his money-making spam operations... The Web sites for CastleCops* - an all-volunteer, online scam fighting community - also have been under a consistent denial-of-service attack for the past couple of weeks..."
(Well, maybe not "weeks", but "days" for certain.)
* http://www.castlecops.com/article-topic-1.html
Backup/emergency URL for ISC
(per: http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=2292
Last Updated: 2007-02-23 04:53:15 UTC)
> http://iscems.dshield.org/index.txt
!