Advantages of online flirting:
- online gifts (mostly free)
- you can do it from the comfort of your home, while having dinner or watching tv
- you can pose as someone younger or older, male OR female
According to an older Nielsen study on Valentine’s day (and the entire week)
- one of the most important weeks for sales on chocolate candy
- people don’t buy more sparkling wine bottles, but they do spend more for a bottle
- during that week, and six weeks after, more pregnancy tests are sold that any other time of the year
- and obviously and most important is that dating services advertise more this time of year on Internet, TV and magazines.
Social Media Stats:
- 1.37 tweets per second which contain the word “valentine” a week before the V day
- 10 tweets per second which contain the word “valentine” during the V day
- 23,700,000 google results for “online dating”
- 119 results if you google for ”scamming women on dating sites” between January 1st and today
- 129 facebook applications related to valentine’s day
- over 500 facebook pages that have valentine’s day in the title
- one tweet at every 8 seconds contains the word “dating”
Why do you do it?
- people expect to receive promotions
- people expect sales on gifts for both real and online shops
Why is it hard to obtain statistics on scammed people?
- because usually involves a conversation
- the process cannot be automatized
- victims become aware of the fraud after 2-3 months that their identity was used by someone else
How do you protect yourself?
- use a security solution (doh!)
- obviously, if you receive the dating site address from a spam message (email spam, twitter spam… and so on) it is not a good idea to go there
- there are also real and legit dating services out there, but that doesn’t mean scammers aren’t using that service.
- be very skeptical. you might believe that if you do not give your card details you will be safe. Giving away your email address also it seems pretty ok, since already a bunch of people know that address. But email + where you were born, who was your teacher, oh… mine also can lead to answering the security questions and reseting the password.
- when joining a dating service, the user could check when that website was registered and created. A site registered 4 days ago and which states it already has 10 mil users might be a very good indicator of a fraud.
- check with google safe browsing
- try saf.li to scan first
- do your homework before joining (spend 5 minutes googling the site)
- if you are into social media, ask people about it (your friends and stuff) ….
- try quickscan.bitdefender.com
podcast
What is it?
It is a network worm that takes advantage of vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows to spread. Initially it used to be the vulnerability described in MS08-067 regarding the RPC Server Service issues, but then it was also able to spread through windows shares and removable storage devices.
How can you get infected?
- if you do not perform your windows updates (yes, I know… sometimes you have to restart your computer, but still!) and if you do not have a security solution installed.
- if the administrator account on the attacked system has a week password (1234567890, admin and even qwerty are NOT good passwords)
- if the computer has the Autoplay feature enabled (who here knows how to disable this?) and an infected mapped/removable disk is attached (everyone has at least one USB stick)
What does it do?
Not much. But could transform your computer into a drone from a larger botnet. It’s like a huge corporation, and your computer just received a nice job in the company. A massively underpaid one!
What can you do with a botnet?
- Corruption of Defensive System - The most dangerous aspect related to Conficker infection is that it completely neutralizes defensive systems. In other words, any infected machine holds a huge security breach that can be exploited anytime from now on. It is like having a house with a door wide open all the time, even when you sleep or go to work or in vacation.
- Distributed Denial of Service – we all know what DDOS is
- Pay-per-Click Systems Abuses and Frauds – oldie but goldie
- Key Logging, Traffic Monitoring and Mass Identity Theft
- Spamming – most probably
Whitepaper – http://www.bitdefender.com/files/Main/file/Conficker_-_One_Year_After_-_Whitepaper.pdf
You are going to like the whitepaper. Did you know a couple of weeks ago we had conficker’s aniversary?
Podcast - http://news.bitdefender.com/site/viewPage/multimedia.html
Tips
- Check with your operating system provider on a regular basis – download and install the latest security updates, malware removal tools, as well as other patches or fixes.
- Install and activate a reliable password protected antimalware, firewall,
- spam filter and parental control solution, like those provided by BitDefender.
- Update your antimalware, firewall and spam filter as frequent as possible,
- with the latest virus definitions and suspicious applications/files signatures.
- Scan your system frequently.
- Stay informed about e-threats and security.
