Posted on 11/19/2004 6:57:12 PM PST by misterrob
Okay folks, need some thoughts on cyber crime. My struggling start-up company was the victim of some soul-less person who decided to use a stolen credit card and then download copyrighted information from our server. They have since contacted us with some extortion demands which we won't pay, based both on principle and poverty. Come up with $40K or they distribute the two reports out to the world. They sent it to 10 people tonight and copied the addressed to us.
I've already filled out an on-line complaint with the FBI and I'm sure holding my breath waiting for them to do anything about it. Anyone else have any thoughts that they could share besides bend over and take it?
Exactly as I understood it.
My point is, for THAT PRICE photocopy proof paper is a cheap investment as is FedEx delivery. Anything in electronic form is almost certain to be be illegally copied - more likely the higher the price.
They have been dealing with this type of crime for several years now and it is growing rapidly. http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel01/nipc030801.htm
Do not make the payoff. If you do, they will either return later, asking for more money, or sell the blackmail material to somebody else who will contact you next.
As I read it, they paid for the privledge of download with a stolen credit card. They did not hack his computer.
Granted it is bad, but computer security is you responsibility. Sounds like a small price to pay for the education you are getting.
No, what they did was steal the credit card of someone else and then use it to steal from me. You don't get tthe product off of the server without having the card authenticated by my merchant account.
I can't see that you'll really lose that much business.
First, how many people on their "mailing list" (and who says that "CoRE" even *has* enough industry savvy to know who would be "high value" contacts and who isn't?) would really be likely buyers of your report in the first place.
Second, unless you've already done business with those companies in the past, odds are that most of the "mass mailings" will end up being looked at by some sysadmin flunky getting the "to no-one in particular" emails, who will either consider the mailing to be some sort of con-game spam and delete it, or at best figure it's worth exactly what the company has paid for it, i.e. nothing -- unsolicited emails seldom contain anything of real value.
Finally, any company who receives it who might actually be in the market for your reports is at least moderately likely to pay you for a legitimate copy if they like what they got illegitimately, or if nothing else will want to contact you to see what other similar products you offer.
So I wouldn't worry *too* much about lost sales, unless these jackasses managed to get a copy of your actual customer list, which I highly doubt.
Bad idea.
My business is much lower tech. I manage a minature golf course.
Last Winter, the aluminium rails were stolen from 36 holes. That's roughly 2000 board feet of aluminiium 2X4[plus 72 custom-castings...hole numbers and par markers].
It was cut up & sold as scrap. The police found which scrap yard bought the ruined rails. They found the ruined bleachers from a soccer stadium & several little league parks. They found cut-up playground equipment stolen from schools and parks. All to no avail.
Scrap Buyers aren't like Pawnbrokers. Scrap Yards can pay in cash, pay with checks made out to cash & not get ID from the sellors/theives. they are not required to "know their sources".
The recycle industry has given thieves a Free Ride. Government {local, state & national} ignores this issue, Recycle is "PC"...can't go there!
Internet Explorer IFRAME Buffer Overflow Vulnerability
Advisory: SA12959
Release Date: 2004-11-02
Last Update: 2004-11-18
Critical:
Extremely critical
Impact: System access
Where: From remote
Solution Status: Unpatched
Software: Microsoft Internet Explorer 6
CVE reference: CAN-2004-1050
Description:
A vulnerability has been reported in Internet Explorer, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user's system.
The vulnerability is caused due to a boundary error in the handling of certain attributes in the IFRAME, FRAME, and EMBED HTML tags. This can be exploited to cause a buffer overflow via a malicious HTML document containing overly long strings in e.g. the "SRC" and "NAME" attributes of the tag.
Successful exploitation allows execution of arbitrary code.
The vulnerability has been confirmed in the following versions:
* Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows XP SP1 (fully patched).
* Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows 2000 (fully patched).
NOTE: This advisory has been rated "Extremely critical" as a working exploit has been published on public mailing lists. A variant of the MyDoom virus is now also exploiting this vulnerability.
It would take an expert to download the code from an infected source and successfully push it out to the cretins. But infected sources are out there - so be careful. ....whatever you do.
...They must have seen your FR tag...misterrob...with a space.
mister rob
No product sold at that price should be delivered automatically without a person reviewing each transaction.
Any legitimate business that might receive this stolen information would be committing a crime by using it.
Assuming that business is in the USA...
Do you have the full headers that came with the email. I might be able to do some snooping around for you. That truly stinks.
Also, when they downloaded the material, do you have access to the logs on your server. It might be interesting to see what IP was used (my guess would be some proxy of throwaway Inet acct) but ya never know.. sometimes these types trip up and you can catch them that way.
Freepmail or ping me and Ill see what I can find out about this Core group.
Just an FYI, of course. One wouldn't want to take on a project like that without extensive knowledge.
Again, contact the FBI. The "bogus email address" is *NOT* the only routing information available. Somewhere there's an electronic "paper trail" indicating where those emails actually originated, and the FBI has a good chance of accessing it.
It might just trace back to some anonymous remailer, but even many of those can be cracked with a proper warrent.
Plus, given the pompous "do not attempt, we are CoRe and we're super hackers, you betcha" messages scattered through the email, it sounds to me more like these are kids trying to convince you *not* to trace them, than real pros secure in their ability to actually stay untraceable. So give it a try.
Finally, don't even think of paying them, except in some sort of "sting" operation designed to entrap them. If you pay them, at all, you'll *never* be rid of them.
Even if they've totally ruined the market value of this report (and I doubt it), you can always write more reports, or update this one so that potential customers would still have a reason to buy the latest and greatest from you, instead of just keeping an illicit copy of the compromised one.
Note to self: Retribution is bad.
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