4 posts and columns on cyber criminals

Voices

"Evercookies" and "Fingerprinting": Are Anti-Fraud Tools Good for Ads?

in News on December 1, 2010 at 12:23 pm PT

Techniques like “evercookies” and “device fingerprinting” are new and controversial in the online ad industry, but they’re widely used by firms that seek to catch cyber criminals. Criminals, who have a powerful incentive to remain anonymous, learned long ago to thwart cookies–small text files associated with their Web browser. So anti-fraud companies began searching for more persistent identifiers.

Voices

Fraudsters Like Virtual Goods

in News on July 21, 2010 at 5:00 am PT

Sales of digital goods such as virtual objects and currency used in online games are taking off with consumers. Unfortunately for their vendors, they are increasingly popular with cyber criminals, too. Merchants that sell digital goods lost 1.9 percent of all revenue to fraud in 2009, compared with a 1.1 percent fraud rate for companies that sell physical goods online, according to CyberSource Corp., which processes credit cards for online merchants.

Voices

Conficker: Don't Believe the Hype

in News on March 26, 2009 at 4:59 am PT

You may have heard about Conficker, the rogue computer program that might do something dreadful on April 1. The truth is that the threat posed by Conficker is almost entirely theoretical, and that only a handful of dedicated professionals will notice anything out of the ordinary when that date comes around.