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A woman has told how she lost her life savings after she fell for a sophisticated text scam. When Suni Wan received a message from her bank HSBC saying that there was some fraudulent activity on her account she called them straight back. The text did not seem unusual as it appeared in the same thread that her bank usually messaged her in. The message told her that a new device had logged onto her account and if it wasn’t her to call back immediately. The man on the other end of the phone said that an S8 had logged...

If you get a text message that looks to be from yourself, don't click on it. That's the sage advice of experts and of Verizon, which has received numerous complaints about customers getting spam text messages that seem to come from their own phone numbers. Verizon's community [customer?] forum includes a thread published on Sunday that details a recent increase in "spoof" texts informing recipients that they've paid their March bill and can get a free gift by clicking a link. "We can't block ourselves..........what's the solution Verizon?" asked one customer of the wireless giant.

Hackers are trying to infect organizations throughout the world with a popular strain of malware by sending emails that appear to be from an Egyptian oil company. In research published Tuesday, Romanian antivirus company BitDefender noted a surge in attempted phishing attacks that try to trick users into downloading malware by masquerading as Enppi, an oil company owned by the Egyptian government. The malware, known as Agent Tesla, is a spyware tool which enables hackers to monitor keystrokes, steal data about file downloads and collect username and password credentials from internet browsers, among other capabilities. The number of attacks spiked...

Researchers at a Washington-based think tank have noticed that a funny thing happens whenever Russian President Vladimir Putin gets close to a harbor: The GPS of the ships moored there go haywire, placing them many miles away on the runways of nearby airports. According to a new report by security experts with the group C4ADS, the phenomenon suggests that Putin travels with a mobile GPS spoofing device and, more broadly, that Russia is manipulating global navigation systems on a scale far greater than previously understood. “Russia continues to act as a pioneer in this space, exposing its willingness to not...

Hillary Clinton's lawyer may have allowed hackers to obtain all of the former secretary of state's emails by reviewing the contents of her private server on a laptop tied to Chinese cyberspies, a House Republican charged on Friday. Heather Samuelson was one of the Clinton aides who sifted through the private email server used during Clinton's tenure at the State Department, and helped decide which would be designated as personal messages and which were work-related. That's when the potential Chinese hacks may have taken place, because she used two laptops made by Lenovo, a company with ties to the Chinese...

OK, this is odd and I'm hoping someone more techie than me has an idea. I get a text today from a number not in my contacts, it says: Caller: "Please text me, I'm busy" Me: Sorry, who is this? C: I've been getting random calls from random numbers only to find out that the person with the number hasn't been calling me at all. This has been going on for over a year. Me: I don't have your number in my phone Person then sends a screen cap of their recent calls showing that my number called them today....

On three or four occasions my cell phone number has been hijacked in someway that I have received phone calls and text messages as though it would seem from myself. Yesterday, the text message I received from myself and the image associated with the non-person who used my cellphone number to send me a text message used an image which I have saved on the cell phone. WHAT THE HECK? ANY SUGGESTIONS?

EXCLUSIVE: Tech company which maintained Hillary's secret server was sued for 'illegally accessing' database and 'stealing White House military advisers' phone numbers' The Internet company used by Hillary Clinton to maintain her private server was sued for stealing dozens of phone lines including some which were used by the White House. Platte River Networks is said to have illegally accessed the master database for all US phone numbers. It also seized 390 lines in a move that created chaos across the US government. Among the phone numbers which the company took - which all suddenly stopped working - were lines...

Reports of satellite navigation problems in the Black Sea suggest that Russia may be testing a new system for spoofing GPS . On 22 June, the US Maritime Administration filed a seemingly bland incident report. The master of a ship off the Russian port of Novorossiysk had discovered his GPS put him in the wrong spot – more than 32 kilometres inland, at Gelendzhik Airport. After checking the navigation equipment was working properly, the captain contacted other nearby ships. Their AIS traces – signals from the automatic identification system used to track vessels – placed them all at the same...

Telemarketers have a new trick to get you to answer the phone — and it’s hitting close to home. Caller ID spoofing, a technique to fake the number a call is coming from, makes detecting pesky robocalls more difficult. One increasingly popular way telemarketers are getting people to answer the phone is by mimicking the user’s number — copying the recipient’s area code and sometimes even the first few digits of their number. Not even the head of the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates phone lines and telemarketers, is immune. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai told NPR he’s been targeted by...

Imagine terrorists using new technology to trick planes into crashing into buildings. It may sound like a Die Hard movie, but the premise, which involves “GPS spoofing,” troubles our nation’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Spoofing became a big deal when University of Texas professor Todd Humphreys accepted a challenge a few years ago from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to use this method to commandeer one of the agency’s drones via a GPS device. Much to their astonishment, he was successful. “It’s easiest to understand GPS spoofing by comparing it with GPS jamming,” Humphreys told the Observer. “Jamming...

Federal investigators probing the “flash crash” that briefly sliced nearly 1,000 points off the Dow Thursday are zeroing in on a series of “unusually high-volume” trades in S&P futures that originated in Chicago, a government official told POLITICO. Those trades set off a chain reaction of trades that caused the biggest drop within a single day in the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s storied history.

Michelle Obama has found herself embroiled in an emails scandal of her own… By Andrew Spalding Commentary by John Velisek USN (Ret), CiR staff writer “As the investigation of Hillary Clinton and her private email scandal is winding down, it’s just been discovered that Michelle Obama may have been involved in an email scandal of her own. The American Medical Association (AMA) released an obesity study last year that revealed that rates have actually changed less than they did in the previous decade. Rather than processing that information, Michelle’s reps decided to claim that obesity in children between ages 2...

Are small, Mom & Pop traders who trust their hard earned dollars to Wall Street being abused? Does a bear wee wee in the woods? A very important trial just started in Chicago that will pull back the curtain on the hidden, high finance trading practice known as spoofing. What is spoofing? Well, the technique combines ultra-fast buys by brilliant computer geeks and smart money guys who make a ton of dough in less time than it takes you to read this sentence. One definition of spoofing says it’s “a fraudulent trading practice that occurs when a trader who owns...

Anti-healthcare calls use Reid's number By Reid Wilson Posted: 08/12/09 04:32 PM [ET] An unknown caller on a recorded message landed in Democratic House offices throughout Wednesday with the caller ID claiming to be with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's (D-Nev.) office. The calls, which deliver an anti-healthcare and anti-spending message claiming to come from constituents, have hit several Democratic offices. But the number that shows up on the House's caller identification system shows the calls are coming from Reid's office. The tactic, known as "spoofing," enraged Reid's office. "An unidentified organization is dishonestly using Sen. Reid’s office number to...

<p>Stem-cell scientists are caught up in fictional friend network — but no-one knows why.</p> <p>In September 2008, Forbes science editor Matthew Herper and former Washington Post reporter Rick Weiss appeared together on a panel at the World Stem Cell Summit in Madison, Wisconsin. In late February, Herper received an invitation to 'friend' Weiss on the Internet social-networking site Facebook. On the basis of their acquaintance, Herper accepted, noticing that a number of other people involved with stem cells were listed as friends on Weiss's profile. However, that profile — and many of those it was linked to — was a fake.</p>

Excerpt - SAN FRANCISCO (AFP)--Internet security researchers warned Thursday that hackers have caught on to a "critical" flaw that lets them control traffic on the Internet. ~ snip ~ "We are in a lot of trouble," said IOActive security specialist Dan Kaminsky, who stumbled upon the Domain Name System (DNS) vulnerability about six months ago and reached out to industry giants to collaborate on a solution. "This attack is very good. This attack is being weaponized out in the field. Everyone needs to patch, please. This is a big deal." ~ snip ~

http://forums.ebay.com/db2/thread.jspa?threadID=1000565444&start=0 Ebay was hacked today. Users complete credit card information was being posted today on eBay's Trust and Safety board including name, cc number, CCV, paypal info, etc. It took eBay over 90 minutes to finally pull down the Trust & Safety server to remove the publicly posted information. If you have an eBay or PayPal account, you might want to monitor the above link.

NORTH LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) -- A man who shares the name of Arkansas' most famous native son has endured many pranks, but none as scary as this one. Bill Clinton of North Little Rock, who is not related to the former president and Arkansas governor of the same name, was the victim of a dangerous prank late last month when another person used a computer to hack into a caller-ID system and hijack Clinton's home number. After hacking into a computer system in a process called "caller-ID spoofing," the as-yet unidentified caller made several calls to Clinton's home...

A new spoofing flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser allows an improperly coded web link to send users to a diffferent URL than the one displayed in the status bar. The flaw, which was posted to the Bugtraq mailing list by Benjamin Franz, is exploited by placing two URLs and a table within a single HTML href tag, producing a link that looks like this: http://www.microsoft.com displaying http://www.microsoft.com in the browser, but sending the user to Google. Franz says the exploit works in fully-patched versions of Internet Explorer and Outlook Express, meaning the HTML code can be used to...