Protect Yourself From Cyber Criminals

Don't you like to protect your money and keep your private information safe? Are you frightened by the possibility an Internet criminal will steal your credit card and do things with your name after stealing your identity? Guess what! You can prevent this mess from happening. Let's go over the steps you can take to prevent identify theft and loss of your money while you are online.

Take precaution with storing information and passwords on any computer you use. You might be thinking, "I am the only one who uses my computer; therefore, I can store the password I use to log into my computer and any accounts I have with different websites." If you believe this and act accordingly, you could be in trouble. Someone might rob you of your laptop or break into your home and steal your computer. Furthermore, you will probably have to recycle or throw away your computer eventually.

Choose passwords wisely. Do not choose a password that has any part of your name or other information that identifies you. Choose an unusual password or a password you think others will have trouble guessing. If you open an online banking account or PayPal account, create a password that contains numbers and capital letters. Never reveal your passwords.

Be careful when reading E-mail messages from PayPal. The real PayPal site only addresses you by your name and it does not provide links for you to click or ask for your password. If you get a "PayPal" or "eBay" message saying you must verify your account to avoid suspension, ignore it. If you are ever tempted to respond, it is safer to copy and paste the link into your browser. If you ever believe an account of yours has been breached, immediately change your password and report the breach to the site holding your account.

Ignore E-mail messages in which you are asked to submit a form to claim a tax refund. The IRS does not actually contact people online unless they are returning a message.

Ignore messages from Microsoft and others that try to get your personal or financial information by claiming you have won the lottery or that you are a beneficiary of a huge sum of money. Also ignore messages in which each letter for the sender or subject line is capitalized.

Take precaution when sending messages online. A cyber criminal gained access to my debit card after I revealed my new debit card number on a web site's contact message form as a result of not being able to get their system to recognize my new debit card.

Handle your social security number with care. Do not provide it when you use a web site or submit a cover letter, resume or other form of communication online.

Be careful when making online purchases. Make sure the site has a padlock symbol that represents a secure purchase. An https site is highly encrypted to prevent others from seeing your credit card.

Use these tips to prevent identify theft and loss of your money!

Todd Hicks owns Skill Development Institute, an enterprise that provides a keyboard typing lesson and academic study guide. To become a great typist or student, visit Skill Development Institute.

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Virtumonde Attacking the Web

Virtumonde Trojan demonstrates that contemporary antivirus protection leaves much to be desired. This malware seems to have been specially created to make popular security programs look imperfect. Some are able to detect the infection, but cannot remove nor quarantine them.

At a closer look Virtumonde is nearly a perfect virus. It self-protects, monitors the system memory of the infected computer, randomly names its malicious files, and integrates with Windows critical processes.

This Trojan is responsible for adware pop-ups, redirecting browsers to websites with ads and malicious scripts. Virtumonde is able to change the desktop background (wallpaper), screensaver, and disable some tabs of Desktop Properties. Besides, some variations of the trojan are capable of disabling Task Manager and Registry Editor thus making everything to prevent its successful removal.
Virtumonde loads a .DLL file into memory to ensure it's always up and running. A special module watches the environment inspecting the processes, and puts the virus back into memory whenever any program (e.g. antivirus) tries to close it.

Self-restoring mechanism allows virtumondo to restore its associated files if some of them are removed by security programs. That is, upon next computer reboot the Trojan is back and fully functioning.
The main files that are integrated with Windows Explorer and Winlogon processes make the infection resistant and hard to remove. Popular Windows security suites from biggest software manufacturers often cannot break the tight linking of the malware to critical components.

This explains why specific steps and virtumonde removal tools are needed to clean out infected computers.

• First, it is necessary to unload malware services from system memory.
• Second, registry entries and keys related to Trojan virtumonde should be deleted at once.
• Third, malicious files should be permanently erased from the system.

All this has to be done in one Windows session, without restarting, or the Trojan will be able to restore itself to previous state.

Several software companies and volunteer programmers decided to develop special tools to help users remove Virtumonde. Among others, Symantec provides a free fix tool for certain variations of the virus.

If you're a victim of the infection and want to remove the trojan with as little hassle as possible, get your hands on free virtumonde removal tools. Available removers are known to fix the malware without the need to call for expert help.
Alberta Glamerheim is an author and consultant who writes about Internet privacy management issues, and publishes articles related to PC security maintenance.

Learning security lessons from the motives of malware

Security threats have changed greatly over the past several years. The worst "hacking" was comprised of kids defacting web pages to get improve their stats on defacement boards and sending out viruses to pronounce their undying love for some unfortunately girl. Concerted, financially motivated attacks did occur, but they were somewhat rare and normally involved industrial espionage of some form.

Today, though, an entire economy has been built around "hacking". Much like television networks trying to attract eyeballs for advertisers, today's hackers are trying to infect computers with trojans and other malware. These "botnets" are sold and traded in an underground market. The purposes for the botnets are varied: stealing backing information from the victims, using the collection of computers to implement an protection racket against DDOS attacks (as we have seen many times lately), to simply installing adware. Because of this, attackers are racing to find and exploit new vulnerabilities in software as quickly as possible - at least before someone else does. There is also no honor between theives - it's not uncommon for some piece of malware to intentionally disable the malware from some other group, so the former can keep his network pure and maintain the profitability of the botnet.

So, what can we learn from this?

We will continue to see faster and faster virus propogations. The virus writers are now financially motivated to infect as many computers as possible before anti-virus signatures are available and applied. Using non-conventional tactics to defend against these viruses are going to be needed. Such tactics include using behavioural virus scanners, rather than singature based scanners. Internet Security Systems and Panda both offer implementations of this.

We will continue to see worms that are released either before or shortly after acknowledgement of a weakness - and quite often before a fix is available. In the past, a rigorous patching program was typically enough to provide a reasonable amount of protection. Again, though, non-conventional tactics are needed - such as general buffer overflow exploit protection, more diligence around segmenting network assets to minimize the spread of worms, and tools to identify when a worm is present. Certainly, this aslo underscores the importance of tightening up already rigorous patching processes. An additional layer of protection can often be found in host and network intrusion prevention tools. Such tools are often updated quickly in response to a new threat and provide a buffer between the release of a worm and the time that systems are patched.

Certainly, organized crime is not the only source of malware - plenty of enterprising individuals are participating. Keeping up with the motivations of hackers will give you a better understanding of what you need to protect against and what threats you can expect down the road.

About the Author

Jerry Bell has been in the information security industry for 8 years and has spent 4 years as the Director with responsibility for information security and regulatory compliance at a $300M public company. IT Capability

Can You Recover After a Security Breach?

If you haven't already taken adequate steps to ensure your data and computer security systems are up to date and working to protect you against hackers and other potential threats, then you should do it right now to ensure the chances of being subjected to a security breach are as small as possible.

Unfortunately some businesses take the attitude that there are always more important things to be doing - such as winning new clients for example - and they never quite seem to get around to it. But if you can number yourself and your business among that group, you could be heading for disaster.

If you need an incentive to make sure your network security is as good as it should be, then consider what you would do and how you would be affected if someone did manage to break into your systems and cause havoc as a result.

A lot of people immediately think of the practical considerations. That is understandable, as you will want to see how much data - if any - was compromised or lost during the security breach. The natural step then is to do what should have been done in the first place and plug those holes so no one can get through them again in the future.

But that isn't the only problem you would be faced with if you did fall victim to the hackers. News of the breach would almost certainly reach your clients in one way or another, and that would mean some serious damage limitation exercises would be due on your part.

Just consider how you would feel if you discovered that your personal information had been compromised like this. Even if you were reliably told that the chances of your information actually being used or accessed by someone else were extremely slim, you would still wonder if that tiny chance would actually happen.

But even if it was safe you would begin to wonder how reliable that company is when it comes to looking after your data. Some people may have been with that company for some time - and yet they would still be thinking about whether or not they should go elsewhere. This is the kind of situation you would be faced with if you became the owner of a business that was known for having been hacked into remotely.

It's not unknown for some businesses to be affected like this and never recover from the damage that is done. This is where many people slip up - they assume the damage is physical and can be repaired, ensuring that nothing similar happens again.

But the real damage is that caused to your customers, and no matter how much apologising you do, the decision of whether those customers stay with you or go elsewhere is, at the end of the day, down to them and them alone.

So why chance the future of your business by leaving its security until tomorrow? If you do, tomorrow might just be too late to do anything about it.

Pure Hacking helps protect your Internet security by providing world-class penetration testing and ethical hacking risk management services. For a free consultation, please visit Penetration Testing