Tag Archives: India

10 Threats from 2010 We’d Prefer Remain History

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By Andrew Brandt

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With 2010 finally behind us, and an unknown number of cyberattacks likely to come in the new year, I thought I’d run down a brief list of the malicious campaigns criminals pulled off last year that I’d really dread to see anyone repeat. Now that they’re in the past, they should stay there.

Operation Aurora: Google’s accusation (with Adobe, Juniper Networks, Rackspace, Yahoo! and Symantec) that China hacked its servers, allegedly stealing private emails stored on the company’s servers. The big surprise wasn’t that it was happening, but that companies were publicly talking about it.

Abused ccTLDs: 2010 saw lots more malicious content originating from previously un-abused country code top-level domains, which are assigned to national authorities, such as the .in (India) and .cc (Cocos (Keeling) Islands) top-level domains. The Cocos Islands’ .cc domain deserves particular note because the more than 2200 malicious domains (discovered during 2010) hosted under this ccTLD outnumber the approximately 600 human inhabitants of the tiny archipelago by nearly 4-to-1.

Koobface: “the little social network worm that could” employed new URL obfuscation techniques, introduced its own keylogger, and focused efforts on a smaller number of social media sites, while Facebook got more proactive at shutting down the worm’s operations quickly. Maybe this year they’ll disappear altogether.

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Tax-Themed Phishing Scams Cross More National Borders

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By Andrew Brandt

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Sometimes, the early bird gets the worm — and not in a good way. People who file their tax returns early are being targeted by a phishing scam that comes with the promise of a big income tax refund.

Unlike previous tax-themed scams, which have been based on the stick — fake warnings or penalties supposedly issued by the Internal Revenue Service and its UK counterpart the HMRC — these carrot Tax Refund Online Form frauds promising payouts appear to originate from different countries’ tax authorities, notably those of India and Canada.

We’ve come across a number of identical pages that have been cleverly designed to resemble the appearance of the Web sites of India’s Income Tax Department and the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA). The fake CRA “Tax refund online form” claims that the recipient will receive CAN$386 — a nontrivial sum — if they provide the necessary credit card information in the form. Wait, what?

The fake page supposedly from India (which inexplicably refers to the Indian Ministry of Finance as the IRS) tells prospective victims that they stand to gain a whopping 820.50 rupees for filling out a form with not only full credit card details but also a bank account and routing number, and debit card PIN, then waiting two to three business days for the information to be “processed” or, as we call it in this country, “stolen, used to commit fraudulent purchases, then discarded.”

And yes, you read that right – 820.50 rupees. For those unfamiliar with current rupee-to-dollar exchange rates, at a little over 46 rupees to the dollar, that’s a false promise you will receive…wait for it…nearly eighteen US dollars.

News flash, income tax filers: If you have been following the law and filing tax returns, and your respective government wants to issue you a refund, they already know where your bank accounts are.
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