A pair of crooks in Oklahoma made more than $400, 000 with a whisper-thin gas-pump credit-card skimmer that they installed in Wal-Mart gas stations, using rental cars while they were doing the installation.
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Whisper-thin gas-pump credit-card skimmers
theshowmecanuck writes “According to the Montreal Gazette, ‘The owner and operator of a well-known ‘real gore’ website is charged with corrupting morals for posting a video allegedly depicting the murder of student Jun Lin by Luka Magnotta. Magnotta, 30, is currently in custody charged with first-degree murder in the death of the 33-year-old Chinese international student, who was killed in Montreal in May 2012. The victim’s severed limbs were then mailed to political parties and elementary schools, and his torso found inside a discarded suitcase.’ A news interview with the detective in charge of the case, airing on CTV as I type this, says he believes the web site hosts a lot of racist content and unimaginable violence. You should note that Canada has less free speech than in America (we have ‘hate crime laws’), but there will likely be some arguments in this vein. The charge against the operator is quite rare and no-one so far remembers it ever being used before.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Gore Site Operator Arrested For Posting Video of Murder
Yesterday, I wrote about an expert witness’s report on Prenda Law ( previously ), the notorious porno copyright trolls (they send you letters accusing you of downloading porn and demand money on pain of being sued and forever having your name linked with embarrassing pornography). The witness said that he believed that Prenda — and its principle, John Steele — had been responsible for seeding and sharing the files they accused others of pirating. After hearing about this, the administrators for The Pirate Bay dug through their logs and published a damning selection of log entries showing that many of the files that Steele and his firm accused others of pirating were uploaded by Steele himself, or someone with access to his home PC. The Pirate Bay logs not only link Prenda to the sharing of their own files on BitTorrent, but also tie them directly to the Sharkmp4 user and the uploads of the actual torrent files. The IP-address 75.72.88.156 was previously used by someone with access to John Steele’s GoDaddy account and was also used by Sharkmp4 to upload various torrents. Several of the other IP-addresses in the log resolve to the Mullvad VPN and are associated with Prenda-related comments on the previously mentioned anti-copyright troll blogs. The logs provided by The Pirate Bay can be seen as the missing link in the evidence chain, undoubtedly linking Sharkmp4 to Prenda and John Steele. Needless to say, considering the stack of evidence above it’s not outrageous to conclude that the honeypot theory is viable. While this is certainly not the first time that a copyright troll has been accused of operating a honeypot, the evidence compiled against Prenda and Steel is some of the most damning we’ve seen thus far. The Pirate Bay Helps to Expose Copyright Troll Honeypot [Ernesto/TorrentFreak]
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Pirate Bay outs porno copyright trolls: they’re the ones pirating their own files
Brian Krebs offers an in-depth look at a “cashout” service used by ransomware crooks to get money from their victims. Ransomware is malicious software that encrypts your personal files and demands that you pay a ransom for the key to decrypt them; the crooks who run the attacks demand that their victims buy prepaid MoneyPak cards and send the numbers for them by way of payment. But converting MoneyPaks to cash is tricky — one laundry, which pipes the money through a horse/dog-track betting service — charges a 60% premium. * The ransomware victims who agree to purchase MoneyPak vouchers to regain control over their PCs. * The guys operating the botnets that are pushing ransomware, locking up victim PCs, and extracting MoneyPak voucher codes from victims. * The guy(s) running this cashout service. * The “cashiers” or “cashers” on the back end who are taking the Moneypak codes submitted to the cashing service, linking those codes to fraudulently-obtained prepaid debit cards, and then withdrawing the funds via ATMs and wiring the proceeds back to the cashing service, minus their commission. The cashing service then credits a percentage of the MoneyPak voucher code values to the ransomware peddler’s account. How much does the cashout service charge for all this work? More than half of the value of the MoneyPaks, it would seem. When a user logs in to the criminal service, he is greeted with the following message: “Dear clients, due to decrease of infection rate on exploits we are forced to lift the price. The price is now 0.6. And also, I explained the rules for returns many times, we return only cheques which return on my side if you cash them out after then we lock the account! There are many clients who don’t return anything, and I will work only with these people now. I warn you.” Cashout Service for Ransomware Scammers
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How ransomware creeps cash out their payments
ATM skimming isn’t limited to ATMs! There are lots of terminals that ask you to swipe your card and/or enter a PIN, and many of them are less well-armored and -policed than actual cashpoints. Skimmers have been found on train-ticket machines, parking meters and other payment terminals. Once a crook has got your card number and sign-on data, they can use that to raid a your account at an ATM. Brian Krebs has a look at some of these devices, including a full-on fascia for a cheapie ATM discovered in latinamerica. The organization also is tracking a skimming trend reported by three countries (mainly in Latin America) in which thieves are fabricating fake ATM fascias and placing them over genuine ATMs, like the one pictured below. After entering their PIN, cardholders see an ‘out-of-order’ message. EAST said the fake fascias include working screens so that this type of message can be displayed. The card details are compromised by a skimming device hidden inside the fake fascia, and the PINs are captured via the built-in keypad, which overlays the real keypad underneath. This reminds me a little of the evolution of payphones — the armadillos of the device world! — and the look-alike COCOTS (customer-owned coin-operated telephones) that presented very soft targets if you could scry through their camouflage. Cash Claws, Fake Fascias & Tampered Tickets
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ATM skimming comes to non-ATM payment terminals in train stations, etc
Court documents obtained by the ACLU reveal just how vulnerable information about your private life is to prying government eyes that get a hold of your phone. It’s more than just your text messages, folks. It’s every connection point your phone has used. More »
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The Government Can Use Your iPhone to Figure Out Where You’ve Been
It sounds like the plot of a movie: two major software corporations join together to shut down an evil global cyber crime operation and engage in wacky hijinks along the way. While the latter can be neither confirmed nor denied, according to an exclusive report by Reuters , Microsoft and Symantec did shut down servers that had been controlling hundreds of thousands of PCs without their users being any the wiser. More »
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Microsoft and Symantec Just Busted a Major Cyber Crime Ring
This startlingly orange gun isn’t something from a sci-fi film set. Instead, it’s a new firearm, from UK-based Selectamark, that fires non-lethal pellets—and marks its targets with DNA for later identification. More »
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This DNA Gun Will Tag Felons for Weeks
Trailrunner7 writes “A 24-year-old Algerian man remains in a Thai jail awaiting extradition to the United States, where he is suspected of masterminding more than $100 million in global bank heists using the ZeuS and SpyEye Trojans. Malaysian authorities believe they’ve apprehended the hacker Hamza Bendelladj, who they say has been jetsetting around the world using millions of dollars stolen online from various banks. He was arrested at a Bangkok airport en route from Malaysia to Egypt. The hacker had developed a considerable reputation as a major operator of ZeuS-powered botnets and bragged about his exploits” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Alleged ZeuS Botmaster Arrested For Stealing $100M From US Banks
No offense to James Earl Jones, but I can’t imagine how anybody could watch the above video of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s little known tryout in the role of Darth Vader, and not see he makes the superior Sith Lord. I mean, it’s not even close. Come on, George. You know you have one more Special Edition left in you before you go. Tell you what — you include this vocal track, and I’ll forgive you for inserting Jar Jar into all the Dagobah scenes, or whatever other nonsense you had planned before we fanboys drove you screaming into retirement. More »
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Arnold Schwarzenegger: Great Darth Vader or the Greatest Darth Vader?