Governments should spend more to cybercriminals, researchers say
Improving the ability of law enforcement agencies to catch cybercriminals should be a priority when governments decide how their cybersecurity budgets get spent, according to University of Cambridge security engineering professor Ross Anderson.
Anderson is one of seven computer researchers from the U.K., Germany, the Netherlands and the U.S. who recently performed an analysis of the costs of cybercrime at the request of the U.K. Ministry of Defence. Their findings were published in a research paper that will be presented on June 26 at the 11th Annual Workshop on the Economics of Information Security in Berlin.
The researchers split the costs of computer crimes into direct losses, indirect losses and costs associated with defending against those crimes in the future. Read more...
Facebook scammers host Trojan horse extensions on the Chrome Web Store
Cybercriminals are uploading malicious Chrome browser extensions to the official Chrome Web Store and use them to hijack Facebook accounts, according to security researchers from Kaspersky Lab.
The rogue extensions are advertised on Facebook by scammers and claim to allow changing the color of profile pages, tracking profile visitors or even removing social media viruses, said Kaspersky Lab expert Fabio Assolini in a blog post on Friday.
Assolini has recently observed an increase in the number of Facebook scams that use malicious Chrome extensions and originate in Brazil.
Once installed in the browser, these extensions give attackers complete control over the victim's Facebook account and can be used to spam their friends or to Like pages without authorization. Read more...
DDoS attackers start targeting IPv6 networks
Cybercriminals have started launching DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks against networks that transmit data over IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6), according to a report published recently by DDoS mitigation vendor Arbor Networks.
Even though 2011 was the first year when IPv6 DDoS attacks were recorded, such incidents remain rare because they are not economically relevant for Internet criminals, said Bill Cerveny, a senior software quality assurance engineer at Arbor.
Some companies have projected increases of more than 100 percent for their IPv6 traffic volumes over the next 12 months, but the changes will be insignificant compared to the overall traffic volume. Read more...
Experts: Mobile devices a growing target for criminals
The best way to protect business information on smartphones from cybercriminals is to leave that information off smartphones, one mobile security expert said Thursday.
Mobile security is still evolving, and smartphones are vulnerable to hackers and to social engineering schemes, said Andrew Hoog, chief investigative officer at viaForensics, a security vendor. Cybercriminals are starting to target smartphones, Hoog said at a cybersecurity summit in Washington, D.C., hosted by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA)
Mobile devices combine personal information and corporate information, Hoog said. "It becomes a much richer target." Read more...