Spyware Phishing Now a World-Wide Epidemic

Nova Scotia July 19, 2005 -- SpyCop today announced that the use of commercial monitoring spy software is on the rise in Internet phishing schemes, the latest scam used to steal personal information and even entire identities. The Anti-Phishing Working Group, web site at www.antiphishing.org, explains: "Phishing attacks use both social engineering and technical subterfuge to steal consumers' personal identity data and financial account credentials... Technical subterfuge schemes plant crimeware onto PCs to steal credentials directly, often using Trojan keylogger spyware."

The commercial spy software market has made available over 525 payware spy programs which include URL recorders, keyloggers, chat monitors, screen recorders, program loggers and more - all very useful tools for a phisherman to steal an identity. Everything a user does can be recorded and watched as if an invisible person is sitting behind them with a video camera pointed at their screen and keyboard. SpyCop Founder Grey McKenzie explains, "Quality monitoring spy programs are often expensive to purchase and investigate, so detecting them can be very expensive. Some companies rely on this to remain largely undetectable, therefore, the only real protection against this threat is a dedicated commercial spy scanner rather than a freeware jack-of-all-trades spyware scanner."

The spyware phishing phenomenon has gone world-wide. Kim Tae-gyu, Staff Reporter at The Korea Times reports, "A serious by-product of Korea's high Internet penetration rate has been an increase in financial crimes, including phishing scams or hacking into Internet banking. "[Hackers] installed a key-logger, which logs every keystroke to harvest private information like user names or passwords, at a computer in a PC room and obtained a female user's data necessary for Internet banking."

"After the incident, KEB made the installation of anti-key-logger programs mandatory and also overhauled its security card system."

It is important for users to have the most recent versions of their security programs installed and up-to-date on their PCs. "Phishing is the latest in Internet ID and information theft", explains Grey McKenzie. "All computer users must takes steps to protect themselves, as a good phisher can be hard to identify before it's too late."

Anyone with a digital camera should definitely back up their pictures offline from their PC. Otherwise, you're guaranteeing that your hard drive will fail!

1) Get a DVD or CD burner on your PC. Periodically copy groups of your recent pictures to a DVD or CD. I prefer to burn to DVD-+R's, rather than DVD-+RW's (- or + either type media depending on burner). The R's (write-once read-multiple) are more reliable than the RW's (read-multiple write-multiple). (I make 2 copies, one on an R, and another on an RW.)

2. Make multiple copies, at least two, stored in different places. You can do this incrementally, by including older pictures with recent pictures when burning another disc. (I have many thousands of digital pictures going back 10 years, all cataloged offline and stored by date.)

3. An additional step is to buy a 2nd hard drive, either internal or external on your PC, and copy all your pictures to it. If your main hard drive crashes, you then have copies of your data on the 2nd drive. (I have 2 PC's each with multiple drives.)

4. It also helps to take your favorite/most-valuable pictures to a print facility (store) and pay extra to have a CD made in addition to creating prints.

Hope this helps. Better to be overly cautious than to lose your irreplaceable pictures.

I certainly wouldn't be doing it if it weren't fun. That is the *only* important thing. I know I come off sounding like a hardcore my way or the highway linux geek, but I get so tired of hearing about stolen credit cards (my mother's computer) or viruses (my grandmother's computer) or spyware (my computer, pre-linux) and so on and so forth when there are completely viable alternatives (not necessarily Linux, either) to the problem.

I don't see why MS doesn't come out and really say "Hey, we have a problem and we're going to fix it. Next release will not allow viruses to run, programs to be installed covertly, or spyware to operate." But, they don't. They have probably spent more on that stupid paperclip in Word than they have on security. But, day after day, man-hours are wasted, users are confounded and upset and businesses are losing big money.

What sort of advantages does it have over a regular PC?

How does "No viruses, adware, spyware, or worms" sound? OSX has been around (16,000,000 users {Newsweek claims 25,000,000!!!}) for over five years and none have been seen in the wild...

How about a sophisticated operating system that is built from the ground up with security in mind? OSX is based on FreeBSD UNIX with industrial strength permissions and user rules?

How about a system that is designed to handle multi-media and comes with most of the software (iPhoto, iDVD, iMovie, you'd need to handle your pictures... free! AND it comes with "Spotlight" built into the operating system that can find that picture you took three years ago in mere seconds...

According to PC and other PC Magazines all previous OS and other software mention in the other threads have been hacked, it just doesn't happening on as large scale as Microsoft. That also goes with users of MAC's and with Linux software. Even this week I received an update on my Firefox because of hackers now hacking Firefox because a lot of people are starting to use it. I will share something I received this morning from PCTech. I hope they don't mind.
'Listing Your TCP Connections

Do you ever worry that someone or something has external access to your system, or wish that you could see all current connections? While its not the most elegant way of doing so, the “netstat” command can certainly work for you. To use it, simply go to “Start -> Run” and type in “cmd” (or if you use Windows 95/98, type in “command”). When the command prompt opens, type in “netstat –a.” This lists all of your active connections for all protocols. If you wish to view only open TCP connections, type in “netstat –p tcp.” When the connections are displayed, from the left to the right is the Protocol, your address and port, the foreign address and port (or who you are connected to), and the connection state. When investigating for the existence of worms, Trojan horses, and spyware, netstat can prove to be a very useful tool!'

I don't have a so called list. I got my info. from a couple of magazines and was only trying to help.

I know you don't have a list... because there ARE NO Spyware, Adware, or viruses for the Macintosh OSX. Your information is quite biased, having been published in PC Magazines. I duplicated your Google search and here is what I found on the first page (My comments in parentheses):

#1 - (Irrelevant article about rising Mac sales but it does mention the lack of any malware...)
#2 - 100 Percent Virus-Free Mac OS X
Adds More Privacy And Security
#3 #4 - (people trying to sell Mac Anti-virus software which if you investigate, merely identifies WINDOWS viruses that might be passed on in email!)
#5 - Macintosh Security Site -> Mac OS X Security Guide v.1 by Chevell ...
MAC OS X Security to the general Macintosh user has never been much of an issue...
#6 - (A guy who's posted an article WISHING that there were OSX viruses... ;^)> The rest of the article is about how to make a Windows XP look like OSX. heheheheh a serious case of OS envy, if I ever saw one!)
#7 - Wired News: OS X Trojan Horse Is a Nag
(Article pointing out that one of those "security issues" list in your link was laughed out of the security industry when Secunia tried to spread FUD about Macs so they could sell their anti-virus software!)
#8 - (another someone trying to push a Mac anti-virus program... again it only finds Windows malware.)
#9 - Mac OS X: Virus-free—For Now
Opinion: Although Mac OS X is essentially virus-free, it can still spread malware, and it could be just a matter of time before it becomes a target ...
#10 - Sophos products - Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac OS X - Manageable ...
Sophos Anti-Virus provides cross-platform virus detection on Mac OS X computers. (Well at least they point out that it is "cross-platform" - but that is because there is NOTHING to detect that impacts the Mac!)

The link you provided linked to a 2004 article written by a PC advocate that smarmily and snidely criticized "Mac OS X Flaws." Of the THREE (3) security issues she mentions, the first two were Trojans... malicious files masquerading as something they were not. The first was not found in the wild but was a proof of concept that was patched before it was announced. The second was a file that claimed not to be a "demo" of Microsoft Office but a pirated install file (all of 16k in size) that did indeed erase the home directory of ONE (1) user... who deserved what he got. She claimed it was "spreading" but the only instance of it doing any damage was that one user.

The URL handler issue was serious... but it required some very unusual things to happen for it to do any damage. It was patched by Apple one week after it was announced.

Finally, the real laugh was Secunia's list of over 30 security advisories... one was the URL issue... the other 29+ required the Mac to be running in ROOT for any damage to be done. ROOT is disabled on the default release of OSX. 99.99999% of Mac users will never activate ROOT nor need to. They also generally were LOCAL exploits potentials, not remote.

You made the assertion that Macs had been "hacked" implying that there was malware for OS X. I submit that you will find only a few viruses for the older Apple OS... OS 9 and below. Latest count on those is 113 including all variants. Latest count on OS X is ZERO.

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