Paypal announced it has agreed to acquire Fraud Sciences, an Israeli security company, for $169 million. The deal marks the first time eBay and PayPal have acquired a security technology company.
eBay's PayPal has been battling online fraud, which has cost it millions of dollars. Paypal is by far the most widely used online payment service, and as such it is one of the biggest targets for phishing and other Internet scams. Fraud Sciences has developed technology that it claims helps in differentiating between legitimate transactions and those perpetrated by fraud.
Fraud Sciences' risk tools will be integrated with PayPal's fraud management system, PayPal President Scott Thompson said. The move "should allow us to be even more effective in protecting eBay and PayPal's hundreds of millions of customers around the world," he said.
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technorati tags: paypal, fraud sciences, online security
PayPal to buy Israeli fraud-detection company
Hackers quickly move to exploit Bhutto assassination
The tragic assassination of the former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has prompted malware authors to jump into action. Security experts are reporting a number of incidents where hackers have tried to con the curious into downloading a video of the assassination which delivers malware instead, according to the security experts McAfee Avert Labs Blog.
McAfee quickly located 10 sites hosted on Blogger.com, Google Inc.'s blog service, that were spreading the fake codec (see picture below).
The sites use the well-worn tactic of promising a video -- in this case one of Bhutto's assassination -- but telling Windows users that they need to install a new high-definition video codec, the program that decodes the digital data stream, to view the clip. Naturally, the so-called codec is no such thing, but is instead rigged code that downloads a variant of the Zlob Trojan horse, a back door that can infect the compromised PC with a wide range of other malware.
"Even death isn't sacred to some," said Symantec researcher Vikram Thakur in a post to the company's security response blog.
Pakistan's former PM Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday after addressing a large gathering of her supporters. John Moore, a photographer for Getty Images, said Bhutto was standing through the sunroof of her vehicle, waving to supporters, when two gunshots rang out. The attacker then blew himself up, killing and injuring a number of civilians. Head to cnn.com for more info and real video regarding the incident.--------------
technorati tags: hackers, Bhutto assassination, Benazir Bhutto, fake codec, trojan Read more...
2008 is coming.. is it the year of the worms?
Is 2008 the year of the worm? Of course it's not, but the latest buzz on the social networking scene is about a worm spreading on Orkut with the message "2008 vem ai… que ele comece mto bem para vc." This translates to "2008 is coming…I wish that it begins quite well for you".
For those who are not familiar with Orkut (and there's a lot of those), it's a social network owned by Google similar to MySpace and Facebook. Though it is not popular in the US, it's a big hit in Brazil (also India), in the same way that Friendster is like the national website of us pinoys here in the Philippines.
According to an alert from anti-virus specialist Trend Micro, infection starts when an Orkut user is sent an e-mail telling them that they have a new Scrapbook entry.. you know, wall posts? comments? testi(monials)?. Logging into Orkut, the victim is greeted with that Portuguese-language message above. Once a user becomes infected, the infected account downloads and executes an embedded Javascript that sends a copy of the original Scrapbook post to all the victim's contacts.
There are jokes saying that "Google has responded quickly. Too bad. If Google had let the worm rampage, maybe some American users might actually hear about Orkut for the first time."
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technorati tags: orkut, worm, google