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March 2010: Security News Round-Up

March 30th, 2010

As we come to the end of yet another interesting month in 2010, we look back at some of the major developments in the field of IT & Computer Security in March.

So here is a quick wind-up of all the events that kept the security analysts busy:

Hackers bypass Captcha: In a shocking incident, the highly secure captcha system was broken by US based miscreants. The impact of the attack was huge, with the fraud value of the event being estimated at $25 million.
Review of our Laptop Encryption Protection: Next, we talked about our full disk encryption which is superior to other encryption methods when comparing security, performance, robustness and ease-of-use for both administrators and users.
Hack attack on St. Louis Police: Next in line was another shocking incident, a malicious attack on police department came to light. The name, address and social security number of about 24 victims was revealed.
UK Tops Cyber Security: This is a piece of news which would made have our friends in UK certainly very proud. A report released by House of Lords committee analyzed and encouraged how the United Kingdom has geared up towards the defence mechanism in the Cyber space.
Some of Our Happy Customers: We showcased the words of praise from some of our happy customers.
Alertsec Xpress is a very easy and convenient service which enables us to secure valuable information on our laptops. Through the Alertsec Xpress service our laptops are secured in just a few minutes.
New ICO Penalties from April: The Information Commissioners Office (ICO) will be rolling out new penalties starting first week of April, the level of financial penalty is set to rise to a maximum of £500 000 (from £5 000), for those companies who do not comply with the Act.
Brazil, India & Korea top the Spam Sending Chart: In terms of percentage spam, Brazil topped with 13.76% of spam, while India came in second with 10.98% and Korea was at third position with 6.32% of spam expressed as percentile of total messages analysed.

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Posted in Alertsec Express, Hackers

Tags: Abuse CAPTCHA Computer security microsoft security Ticketmaster United States Website

Hackers bypass Captcha

March 2nd, 2010

Do you remember those numbers that you enter for verification while signing up for a new yahoo account? Yes, we are talking about a CAPTCHA (pronounced /ˈkæptʃə/) which is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer.

Early CAPTCHAs such as these, generated by the...

Image via Wikipedia

While Captcha ensures security of critical data on the internet, 4 notorious miscreants from California had other ideas. The culprits who were identified as Kenneth Lowson, 40; Kristofer Kirsch, 37; and Joel Stevenson, 37, Faisal Nahdi, 36, were charged in the indictment.

What they did ?

These men who worked for Wiseguy Ticket Inc. hacked into the system of popular ticket sellers such as Ticketmaster, Tickets.com, MLB.com and MusicToday. They bought and resold over 1.5 million tickets to brokers in the New Jersey area. The equivalent value of fraud is estimated at $25 million. These were tickets of popular shows including Bruce Springsteen and Kenny Chesney concerts, also included were 2007 Major League Baseball playoff games at Yankee Stadium and Broadway productions of Wicked and The Producers.

How they did it ?

To provide un-biased access of tickets to popular events, the vendors such as Ticketmaster have put a limitations on the number of tickets that can be bought by an individual or a company. To execute this concept, online vendors have set up necessary software to which detects and prevents automated systems from dispensing bulk tickets in one go.

According to the government the employees at Wiseguy also worked with computer programmers in Bulgaria and developed a network of strong desktops which could be used to impersonate human beings. Evenutllay this lead to bombardment of tickets at the vendor’s place. Apparently, the culprits also had access to fake domain accounts & passworrds.

The Wiseguy team earned profited from the scheme by selling the tickets at a markup to the by charging its ticket brokers a percentage mark-up over the face value.

U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman said the tickets cost consumers an average of $30 a piece, with some premium seats going for more than $1,000, before they were turned over to a regular ticket broker at inflated prices. He also said, ‘Today’s indictment represents a significant step forward in the fight against those who use fraud to disrupt e-commerce and evade computer security’.

Infact this is not the first case were these guys have been caught. The charges also cites references to 42 additional counts of wire fraud; where unauthorized access to computer system has been gained resulting in damage to computers in the local commerce.

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