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July 20, 2003

Spyware Used To Clean Out Bank Accounts

Investigators are trying to track down a scammer in South Africa who seems to have cleaned out a bunch of bank accounts after using some spyware to get the account owners' passwords. The scammer apparently sent emails with an attachment that some gullible people clicked on. 

The attachment installed some keylogger software, which was used to determine a bank account password. Now, at least nine bank patrons have discovered that all their money is missing. Amusingly, the bank in question is going out of its way to make sure everyone knows that the scammer did not hack into their servers, but rather got the passwords off the victims own computers via the spyware. 

Of course, I'm wondering why all the victims came from the same bank. You would think that there would be a variety of banks that would have been targeted. It also sounds like this shouldn't be all that hard to solve. There should be information about who sent the original scam email, and investigators should be able to trace where the money was transferred to - since it was all done via an internet connection into the bank.

AKS Suggests Solution: Prevent recovering deleted files with QuickWiper

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Blogged by Bob Simpson, 20 July 2003

Big Brother in action - RFID tags on Gillette Mach3 razors

A UK supermarket chain has admitted testing controversial technology that tracks customers buying certain products through its stores. Anyone picking up Gillette Mach3 razor blades at Tesco's Cambridge store is photographed.

The paper found that tags in the razor blades trigger a CCTV camera when a packet is removed from the shelf. A second camera takes a picture at the checkout and security staff compare the two images.

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Blogged by Bob Simpson, 20 July 2003