The Coming Storm

February 16, 2016

The Great EMV Fake-Out: No Chip For You!

This post was originally published on this siteMany banks are now issuing customers more secure chip-based credit cards, and most retailers now have card terminals in their checkout lanes that can handle the “dip” of chip-card transactions (as opposed to the usual swipe of the card’s magnetic stripe). But comparatively few retailers actually allow chip transactions: Most are still asking customers to swipe the stripe instead of dip the chip. This post will examine what’s going on here, why so many merchants are holding out on the dip, and where this all leaves consumers. Visa CEO Charles W. Scharf said in an earnings […]
March 6, 2016

Seagate Phish Exposes All Employee W-2’s

This post was originally published on this site Email scam artists last week tricked an employee at data storage giant Seagate Technology into giving away W-2 tax documents on all current and past employees, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. W-2 forms contain employee Social Security numbers, salaries and other personal data, and are highly prized by thieves involved in filing phony tax refund requests with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the states. Seagate headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. Image: Wikipedia According to Seagate, the scam struck on March 1, about a week after KrebsOnSecurity warned readers to be on the lookout for email […]
March 11, 2016

Hackers Target Anti-DDoS Firm Staminus

This post was originally published on this site Staminus Communications Inc., a California-based Internet hosting provider that specializes in protecting customers from massive “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attacks aimed at knocking sites offline, has itself apparently been massively hacked. Staminus’s entire network was down for more than 20 hours until Thursday evening, leaving customers to vent their rage on the company’s Facebook and Twitter pages. In the midst of the outage, someone posted online download links for what appear to be Staminus’s customer credentials, support tickets, credit card numbers and other sensitive data. The e-zine posted online Thursday following an outage […]
April 7, 2016

FBI: $2.3 Billion Lost to CEO Email Scams

This post was originally published on this site The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) this week warned about a “dramatic” increase in so-called “CEO fraud,” e-mail scams in which the attacker spoofs a message from the boss and tricks someone at the organization into wiring funds to the fraudsters. The FBI estimates these scams have cost organizations more than $2.3 billion in losses over the past three years. In an alert posted to its site, the FBI said that since January 2015, the agency has seen a 270 percent increase in identified victims and exposed losses from CEO scams. […]