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Cyber Crime
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An elaborate Twitter scam involving a sensational tweet about Barack Obama has been detected by Panda Security. This scam lures its victims with a promise of a video showing president Barack Obama punching a man for cursing him, leads them to a fake Facebook page where it steals their Twitter credentials, and closes the deal by enticing them to download a malicious worm disguised as “an update for YouTube player”.
It all starts with the scandalous tweet you can see below (personal details and racist content blurred). Users receive this tweet as a DM, and if tempted to click, they’ll be led to a fake Facebook page, where they will be asked for their Twitter credentials in order to watch the video. If you choose to enter your Twitter details here, the malware will promptly hijack your account and begin sending these DMs to all your contacts in your name.
Next, users are taken to a second fake Facebook page, complete with a fake YouTube frame, where a new message appears: “An update for YouTube Player is needed”, it says, prompting you to install this update in order to watch the video. Naturally, this is no YouTube Player update, but the Koobface.LP worm, which will infect your computer and steal your personal data.
This is by no means the only scam of its kind going around. As always, it’s crucial that you don’t click links with suspicious messages about scandalous videos and pictures of you or others, even if they seem to come from people you know. And even more importantly, if you’ve already clicked it, never enter your credentials and never download anything that looks even remotely off. An updated anti-virus software can save you if you’ve gone as far as downloading the worm.
Did you encounter this scam on Twitter?
Source: Panda Security
Image credit: Shutterstock
The post Beware: Sophisticated Obama Scam Can Take Over Your Twitter Account & Computer [Updates] appeared first on MakeUseOf.
feedly. feed your mind. http://www.feedly.com
Social Media Information: Warn Your Teens About The Dangers Of Using Social Networking Websites.
Warn Your Teens About The Dangers Of Using Social Networking Websites
Are you the parent of a teenager? If so, there is a good chance that you are wondering about their safety online, as you should be. Although the internet has changed for the better, that change has made it easier for people to access the internet and pretend to be someone that they are not, someone who you would likely not want socializing with your child. For that reason, you are advised to take the proper action needed to protect your child when they are online, especially when they use online social networking websites.
Online social networking websites? What are they? If you are not an internet user yourself, you may be completely unaware of social networking websites, what they are, and how they operate. The first step in protecting your teen is to famialrize yourself with them. Social networking websites are known as online communities that aim to connect internet users with each other. Unfortunately, these social networks have become the stomping grounds for many online predators and who are they after? Teenagers and chances are your teen may be one of them.
When it comes to protecting your child, your first thought may be to prohibit the use of online networking websites. Of course, you can do this if you want to. You are the parent, you can do anything that you want; however, there is really no need to. Despite the fact that danger exists, social networking sites are relatively safe, even for teenagers. However, to be safe and stay safe, your teenager needs to know what to avoid and who to be on the lookout for. Essentially, this means that they best way to protect your child from online predators is to educate them on the danger that is out there.
One of the first things that you may want to discuss with your child is who they are talking with online. Although they may not want to give you an answer, you need to emphasize the importance of knowing who they are talking to. Since social networks work to connect individuals who do not physically know each other it may seem impossible, but it can be done. Your child should fully read and try to understand the content of their friend’s online profiles. Tell your teen that if they learn that someone is being untruthful they need to end the conversation right away.
As with who they are talking to, your teenager may not want to give you a straight answer. Be sure they know that it is best to completely avoid individuals who like to speak of sex, drugs, and other illegal activities.
Perhaps, the most important thing to discuss with your teenager about social networking sites is arranging physical meetings. Let them know that these meeting are unacceptable. Unfortunately, many of these online friends turn out to be older and, in many cases, sexual predators. In the event that your teenager wants to meet an online friend and you feel that they would with or without your permission, you may want to offer to go with them. Of course, it is advised that you use caution and all meet in a public place.
By keeping the above mentioned points in mind, your child should still be able to use social network sites, but use them safely. In addition to the above mentioned safety concerns and precautionary measures, you may have your own. Whether you do or not, it is important that you keep your child aware of the dangers that lurk online, awareness is the key.
Please feel free to leave us your comment on this subject.
Facebook Scam Targets Whole Foods Shoppers [ALERT]
Jolie O’Dell | Apr 2, 2010
Whole Foods, a popular health and organic grocery chain, is the subject of a new Facebook scam that phishes for users’ credit and other personal information.
A deluge of fraudulent Facebook Pages are popping up that promise a limited number of users Whole Foods gift cards. These Pages are accruing thousands of fans and siphoning off sensitive and lucrative data.
The groups offering Whole Foods gift cards are in no way affiliated with the supermarket; rather, con artists are using the Pages to uncover important personal and financial information from users via a bogus credit assessment. After giving the requested information, users watch their computers crash as their identities are completely exposed.
Some of the Pages ask users to spam all of their friends to become fans as well, allegedly a required step for getting a gift card.
The food store chain is trying to shut the scammers down as quickly as possible and is also trying to notify folks via Twitter that the hoax is precisely that. “It’s a scam, unaffiliated and unauthorized by us!” says one tweet. “Please help us report these pages so Facebook can shut them down.”
Unfortunately, the scammers behind these Pages are creating more, even as Facebook, Whole Foods and vigilant users attempt to shut them down. To report these pages to Facebook, simply scroll to the bottom of the offending Page and click “Report Page.” To get real content from and about the supermarket, check out the official Whole Foods Facebook Page.
If you have any think before you click tips or comments please feel free to leave one.
It is your job to know your rights. In keeping with a new tradition, Facebook is ready to alter its Privacy Policy and Statement of Rights yet again, but it’s asking for user feedback before making the changes permanent.
The proposed changes encompass an array of things, including location (another sign of things to come), new language related to sharing, information on controls for data shared with third parties, and more explanations to make features like the “Everyone” setting more digestible to users.
Some of the changes are preemptive in nature. Location-sharing, for example, doesn’t yet exist on Facebook, but we know that details of what’s to come are expected to be revealed at f8, Facebook’s developer conference.
The new language hints that those QR Codes discovered earlier in the month could be forthcoming in relation to location. According to the blog post on the changes, Facebook has “removed the old language and, instead added the concept of a ‘place’ that could refer to a Page, such as one for a local restaurant. As we finalize the product, we look forward to providing more details, including new privacy controls.”
Users are encouraged to offer their feedback on the Documents tab — which also includes the full text of the proposed policies — via the Facebook Site Governance Page. There’s only a seven-day window, so make sure to check out the changes and offer your feedback before 12:00 a.m. PDT on April 3, 1010.
Lon S. Cohen is a freelance writer and is @obilon on Twitter. He’s also the Director of Communications at @ALSofGNY.
From felons on Facebook to tips through Twitter, social media is being used more and more by law enforcement agencies, and not just to fight Internet-related crimes. We’re talking about solving crimes that are happening on the street and in your community.
According to Lauri Stevens, founder of LAwS Communications and organizer of the SMILE (Social Media In Law Enforcement) Conference being held in Washington D.C. this April, adoption of social media is still in the “very, very, early stages,” but she sees it making an upward turn. “I expect 2010 will be a monumental year,” she said.
But many police departments that have embraced social media are still trying to figure it out.
“Most agencies … are not significantly proactive with keeping up with content and updates,” said Terry Halsch from CitizenObserver.com, developers of the tip411 system for police agencies. “There are some limitations because of uncertainty of how secure information is, how can it be efficiently maintained, [and] the risks and liabilities of entering the world of social media.”
Below are six different ways law enforcement is utilizing social media and real-time search to enhance tactics, disseminate public information, and ultimately prevent criminal activity.
1. Police Blotter Blogs
A police blotter is the record of events at a police station. Traditionally, a desk sergeant kept a register of these events. Nowadays, Twitter feeds, blogs, YouTube, and Facebook Fan Pages are being used by captains and chiefs to put out the digital equivalent of the police blotter in real-time.
Publishing a register of crimes and arrests in an area has been an online activity for a while now, especially through local newspaper websites. But social media is allowing many police officers on the scene to report the publicly available details of a crime for themselves. Reporters are getting their facts directly from a stream of real time-data and blog posts coming from the department.
Individual cops aren’t about to turn into citizen journalists anytime soon, but the police are able, through social media and real-time updates, to provide essential information that the public and news gathering agencies need to know. Journalists today often use the web for their first line of research, and rely on web-based police reports for many of the details they need for a story.
“We don’t just release the police report; we write our own story and post it to our website,” said Mark Economou, the Public Information Manager for the Boca Raton Police Department in Boca Raton, Florida in a post on ConnectedCops.com. “Even more interesting, we are finding the media is just cutting and pasting our stories to their sites, both in television and print.”
The Boca Raton Police Department has developed their own branded web platform that they call Viper. Social media is a very important part of their strategy, and like anyone adopting social media into a plan, they use it to support and enhance the work they already do.
2. The Digital “Wanted Poster”
In the vein of an Old West “Wanted” poster, displayed in the most trafficked area of town, modern-day law enforcement agencies are posting descriptions of criminals on today’s most trafficked spots — namely the social web.
With millions of users, extraordinary reach, and the lightning-fast exchange of text, photos, and video, platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are ideal for getting the word out about wanted persons with up-to-the-minute updates.
The Boynton Beach Police Department is a good example. On their Facebook Fan Page, the department put up a post with the headline, “Police need help identifying motorcyclist who robbed man at ATM.” In the post there was a photo from the ATM machine of the crime in progress. The department also cross-posted the information to their Twitter page.
In the UK, the Leicestershire Constabulary is one of a number of police departments focusing on being hyper-local and involved with the community through social media. Their website has a section titled “Can you help?” which is formatted like a blog, and contains posts about ongoing criminal investigations, and a “Wanted Poster” and “Missing Persons” area with photos and requests for residents to respond with any leads they might have.
The stories are also fed to a Facebook Page that is very interactive and updated constantly. They also maintain a Twitter profile, a YouTube account, and the department offers the ability to subscribe to their news feed via RSS. It’s an impressive mixture of social media tools that seems to work fluidly and update automatically.
3. Anonymous E-Tipsters
Tips from the community have been a time-honored way that citizens have worked with the public to fight crime.
Consulting companies are developing very sophisticated ways for the public and the police to interact online. The tip411 program developed by the CitizenObserver Corporation is marketed to law enforcement as a web-based notification toolset. Citizen participation has always been a big part of fighting crime, and the people at tip411 stress that social media “acts as a ‘force multiplier’ by empowering your community to get involved.”
“Anonymous text tip systems are gaining significant traction because they enable young people to provide information without fear of retribution, i.e. ‘Snitches get Snitches,’” said CitizenObserver’s Terry Halsch.
The program allows tipsters to send information anonymously through a variety of means including “anonymous web chat, text tips and secure social media publishing.” Filtered alerts can then be pushed out through a police department’s central location to other web mediums. Bundled with other offerings, tip411 can then be published with Google Maps to create a clickable, interactive crime “heat map” of sorts where others can click on links directly to add more information and tips based on location. This program is meant to encourage increased interaction between the police and the community through real-time web tools.
“It doesn’t matter to us where the information comes from,” said Detroit’s Chief of Police, Warren Evans, a tip411 user. “We just want the information so we can act on it. I want people to know that they can feel safe using this system to communicate with us directly.”
4. Social Media Stakeout
Social media advocates stress listening as a part of any brand’s online marketing strategy. Listening to the bad guys doing bad things has always been a part of police work. It’s important for police to search the real-time web to target particular keywords and phrases being passed around on social media. Use of social media monitoring has a strategic, tactical and operational application for law enforcement.
Boston Police Department Superintendent John Daly spoke about using Twitter search to monitor chatter around the Boston area in real-time. He’s very sensitive to the implications of engaging in this type of search, as many police departments are.
“We have to be very careful because there’s a Big Brother aspect to this,” Daly said.
He stressed that they were not looking at “everyday messages,” as he put it, but specific tweets that signaled something they should be looking into.
“But when people start saying, ‘What’s that smoke coming from the Hancock Tower?’ or ‘Why is everybody running around Copley Place –- is something going on?’ — if two or three things come in we look at patterns, trends, something maybe we should be paying attention [to]. So it’s sort of an early warning system.”
5. Thwarting Thugs in the Social Space
Myspace, Facebook and Twitter are popular with gang members, and police use this to their advantage. Law enforcement has been able to infiltrate street gangs by posing as fellow gang members online, making connections, and intercepting criminal communications as they happen. Information like photos, videos, and friend links help law enforcement understand the dynamics of gangs when investigating their activities.
“Investigators build phony profiles to ‘friend’ gang members either within YouTube, Facebook or Bebo, and then may migrate that friendship to another platform and gain trust and get their ‘friends’ to share useful information,” said SMILE conference organizer Lauri Stevens.
According to an article in 219magazine, police in Cincinnati used Facebook and MySpace to follow more than 20 members of a local gang, the “Northside Taliband.” The evidence they gathered helped law enforcement connect members to a multitude of crimes, including a possible homicide.
Other agencies have employed these tactics as well. The NYPD is using the Internet to monitor gang activity, as well, and in a story reported in the Daily News, cops said that gangs have been communicating on Twitter. They think that one Twitter exchange between gang members may even have resulted in the shooting of a youth. The police seek out code words and slang used by individual members to follow gang members online who are organizing illegal activities.
“It is another tool … just like old phone records,” a police source said in the article.
6. Tracking and Informing with Twitter
As we all know, Twitter has plenty of uses for individuals and companies. Law enforcement also uses the service to communicate with the public.
Stevens told us that she follows at least 700 law enforcement agencies worldwide on Twitter alone. Not all of them are active, but some have found unique ways to incorporate Twitter into their police tactics. “The LAPD used Twitter to monitor crowds during the Michael Jackson funeral,” for example, said Stevens, and the Boston Police have been using Twitter to alert followers of evolving situations in real time.
Sergeant Tim Burrows does media relations for the traffic services unit in the Toronto Police Service. Tim saw his traffic safety messaging hampered by the mainstream media’s editing time lines, so he started using Twitter to talk to the local media about ongoing situations and inform the public. He considers his tweets about traffic safety information a valuable public service.
The Broward County Sheriff’s Office took things a step further. When the police wanted to utilize social media they, like many agencies, felt that existing public sites were too unsecured and vulnerable for a system-wide roll out within the department. So inspired by Twitter, the department took things into their own hands.
“CyberVisor was my vision of Broward County Sheriff’s Office’s own controlled Twitter,” said Lynne Martzall, External Affairs Manager, who worked with webmaster Tony Petruzzi to create it.
Since it was rolled out, CyberVisor has been used to broadcast information about unfolding situations, such as crimes in progress, to put out information after a bank robbery and when the Sheriff’s Office was looking for an escaped convict. For now, the public can’t respond to CyberVisor — it’s broadcast only — but it has still be effective.
In one instance, they alerted followers to someone in South Broward County impersonating an officer. In another, they sent out a missing child alert from a local elementary school with a detailed description of the child’s physical appearance and where the child was last seen.
More social media resources from Mashable:
– The Science of Building Trust With Social Media
– How Companies Are Using Your Social Media Data
– How Twitter in the Classroom is Boosting Student Engagement
– 4 Ways the Entertainment Industry is Getting More Social
– How Musicians Are Using Social Media to Connect with Fans
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, jodiecoston
Reviews: Bebo, Facebook, Google Maps, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, iStockphoto, michael jackson
Tags: BLOGS, facebook, law enforcement, police, social media, social networks, twitter, youtube
When I said “cell phones can be hacked” I mention just that.
Posted by Stan Schroeder on Thursday Mar 25th at 5:57am
The annual Pwn2Own contest at the CanSecWest security show in Vancouver gives hackers and security experts a chance to demonstrate their ability and try to breach the security of various devices and software, and boy, were they successful this year.
Nearly all major browsers – Firefox, Safari, IE8 – were hacked at the contest. A non-jailbroken iPhone was also hacked and its SMS database stolen.
Vincenzo Iozzo and Ralf Philipp Weinmann sent an iPhone to a web site they’d set up, crashing its browser and then stealing its entire SMS database (including some erased messages). It is possible, however, to set up a similar attack to work without crashing the browser, hackers claim, and set up different attack payloads. Iozzo and Weinmann won a $15,000 prize for successfully demonstrating the attack. Details about the attack will be released once Apple is notified and the security hole is patched.
Charlie Miller, principal security analyst at Independent Security Evaluators, managed to hack Safari on a MacBook Pro without physical access, which won him $10,000. Nils (no last name given), head of research at UK-based MWR InfoSecurity, won $10,000 for hacking Firefox, and independent security researcher Peter Vreugdenhil won the same amount for hacking IE8. All the browser attacks were done by having the browser visit a malicious web site; although full details aren’t disclosed, Cnet has some more technical info on the attacks.
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Hello my name is Clarence Gautreau. This site is about fun, entertainment, technology, computers, software hardware safety and use. Insight about technology in the interactive playground of social media and device development. Learning how to keep yourself safe and skilled with new technology and interactive media.
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