Cyber Crime

Cyber Stalking can be defined as the repeated acts harassment or threatening behavior of the cyber criminal towards the victim by using internet services. Stalking in General terms can be referred to as the repeated acts of harassment targeting the victim such as following the victim, making harassing phone calls, killing the victims pet, vandalizing victims property, leaving written messages or objects. Stalking may be followed by serious violent acts such as physical harm to the victim and the same has to be treated and viewed seriously. It all depends on the course of conduct of the stalker.

Both kind of Stalkers – Online & Offline – have desire to control the victims life. Majority of the stalkers are the dejected lovers or ex-lovers, who then want to harass the victim because they failed to satisfy their secret desires. Most of the stalkers are men and victim female.

How do they Operate

1. Collect all personal information about the victim such as name, family background, Telephone Numbers of residence and work place, daily routine of the victim, address of residence and place of work, date of birth etc. If the stalker is one of the acquaintances of the victim he can easily get this information. If stalker is a stranger to victim, he collects the information from the internet resources such as various profiles, the victim may have filled in while opening the chat or e-mail account or while signing an account with some website.
2. The stalker may post this information on any website related to sex-services or dating services, posing as if the victim is posting this information and invite the people to call the victim on her telephone numbers to have sexual services. Stalker even uses very filthy and obscene language to invite the interested persons.
3. People of all kind from nook and corner of the World, who come across this information, start calling the victim at her residence and/or work place, asking for sexual services or relationships.
4. Some stalkers subscribe the e-mail account of the victim to innumerable pornographic and sex sites, because of which victim starts receiving such kind of unsolicited e-mails.
5. Some stalkers keep on sending repeated e-mails asking for various kinds of favors or threaten the victim.
6. In online stalking the stalker can make third party to harass the victim.
7. Follow their victim from board to board. They “hangout” on the same BB’s as their victim, many times posting notes to the victim, making sure the victim is aware that he/she is being followed. Many times they will “flame” their victim (becoming argumentative, insulting) to get their attention.
8. Stalkers will almost always make contact with their victims through email. The letters may be loving, threatening, or sexually explicit. He will many times use multiple names when contacting the victim.
9. Contact victim via telephone. If the stalker is able to access the victims telephon, he will many times make calls to the victim to threaten, harass, or intimidate them.
10. Track the victim to his/her home. [click to continue...]

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“Pharming” is when criminal hackers redirect Internet traffic from one Web site to a different, identical-looking site in order to trick you into entering your user name and password into the database on their fake site. Banking or similar financial sites are often the target of these attacks, in which criminals try to acquire your personal information in order to access your bank account, steal your identity, or commit other kinds of fraud in your name.

The use of faked Web sites may make pharming sound similar to e-mail phishing scams, but pharming is more insidious, since you can be redirected to a false site without any participation or knowledge on your part.

To date, there have been few documented attacks, and maintaining the integrity of the Web is very high on the list for governments and businesses. It’s also important to remember that the Web is free and public resource, akin in many ways to a library, mall, or other public services where you live. For most people, the advantages to going out to shop, conduct business, do research, socialize and so on, far outweigh the dangers and unpredictability of being in a public space.

If you notice something suspicious about a trusted Web site, report it—by telephone if possible—to the business or site owner. It may be a normal glitch or a new update, or it may be a mistake a criminal has made when trying to duplicate a Web site. This article on phishing scams provides some tips on how to tell if a Web site might be a fake.

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What is online fraud or phishing?

Phishing (pronounced “Fishing”) is an online fraud technique used by criminals to entice you to disclose your personal information. Phishing is the fastest rising online crime method used for stealing personal finances and perpetrating identity theft.

Phishers use many different tactics to lure you, including e-mail and Web sites that mimic well-known, trusted brands. A common phishing practice involves “spamming” recipients with fake messages that resemble a valid message from a well-known Web site or a company that the recipients might trust, such as a credit card company, bank, charity, or e-commerce online shopping site. The purpose of fake messages is to trick consumers into providing the following personal information:

• Name and username.
• Address and phone number.
• Password or PIN.
• Bank account number.
• ATM/debit or credit card number.
• Credit card validation code (CVC) (card validation code: A code that credit card companies use to authorize credit card charges. For example, American Express uses a four-digit number on the front of the credit card, and Visa, MasterCard, and Discover use a three-digit number on the back.) or card verification value (CVV).
• Social security number (SSN).

Criminals use this information in many ways for financial gain. For example, a common practice is identity theft, whereby the criminal steals your personal information, takes on your identity, and can then do the following:

• Apply for and get credit in your name.
• Empty your bank account and max out your credit cards.
• Transfer money from your investment or credit line accounts into your checking account, and then use a copy of your debit card to withdraw cash from your checking account at ATMs around the world. [click to continue...]

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• Never reply to e-mail messages that request your personal information Be very suspicious of any e-mail message from a business or person that asks for your personal information — or one that sends you personal information and asks you to update or confirm it. Instead, use the phone number from one of your statements to call; do not call a number listed on the e-mail message. Similarly, never volunteer any personal information to someone who places an unsolicited call to you.
• Don’t click links in suspicious e-mail Don’t click a link contained in a suspicious message. The link might not be trustworthy. Instead, visit Web sites by typing their URL into your browser or by using your Favorites link. Do not copy and paste links from messages into your browser.
• Use strong passwords and change them often If your account allows them, strong passwords combine uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols, which make them difficult for other people to guess. Don’t use real words. Use a different password for each of your accounts and change them frequently. It’s hard to remember all those passwords. For tips on creating strong passwords and how to remember and store passwords securely, see Creating stronger passwords. [click to continue...]

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Spam is amazing. In an unprecedented and astonishing effort, junk email reaches almost everybody online.All it takes to get on the mailing lists used by spammers is an email address. There is no need to sign up for anything or ask for emails. The spam just starts coming, out of nowhere, apparently without any plan, and without a reason. It invades email addresses that are never used.

But how do spammers discover email addresses? How do they find your mailbox when your best friend does not?

Dictionary Attack

Big free email providers like Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail are a spammer’s paradise, at least when it comes to finding spammable addresses.

Millions of users share one common domain name, so you already know that (”hotmail.com” in the case of Hotmail).

Try to sign up for a new account and you will discover that guessing an existing user name is not difficult either. Most short and good names are taken.

So, to find email addresses at a large ISP, it’s enough to combine the domain name with a random user name. Chances are both “asdf1@hotmailcom” and “asdf2@hotmail.com” exist.

To beat this kind of spammer attack,

• use long and difficult addresses.

Brute Searching Force

Another tactic employed by spammers to discover email addresses is to search common sources for email addresses. They have robots scanning web pages and following links.

These address harvesting bots work a lot like the search engines’ robots, only they’re not after the page content at all. Strings with ‘@’ somewhere in the middle and a top-level domain at the end are all the spammers are interested in.

While not picky, the pages the spammers are particularly keen to visit are web forums, chat rooms and web-based interfaces to usenet because lots of email addresses are likely to be found there.

This is why you should

• disguise your email address when you use it on the net or, better yet,
• use disposable email addresses.

If you post your address on your own web page or blog, you can

• encode it

so visitors who want to send you an email can see and use it, but spambots cannot. Again,

• using a disposabe address

provides a very effective and at the same time convenient alternative.

Worms Turning Infested PCs Into Spam Zombies

To avoid being detected and filtered, spammers seek to send their emails from a distributed network of computers. Ideally, these computers are not even their own but those of unsuspecting users.

To build such a distributed network of spam zombies, spammers cooperate with virus authors who equip their worms with small programs that can send bulk emails.

Additionally, these spam sending engines will often scan the user’s address book, web cache and files for email addresses. That’s another chance for spammers to catch your address, and this one is particularly difficult to avoid.

The best anybody can do is

• keeping their email program updated and patched,
• being vary of any attachments they did not request and
• doing virus scans with a free, up to date scanner regularly.

From Heinz Tschabitscher

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Spam works and exists because it is so cheap to send an email. Since the cost of sending bulk emails to hundreds of thousands of people is so low, it pays off if only a fraction of the recipients respond.Rising the cost of email is hardly an option. So it is important to

• never buy from spammers.

Don’t even visit their web sites or do anything else they want you to do. If there is no profit in spamming, all spammers that are in it for the money (and I bet all of them are) have an incentive to stop.

Since spam is to some degree in the eye of the beholder, chances are nobody ever buys something responding to spam anyway, though. For those who buy, the message was targeted.

The problem is actually not with those who reply to spam. The problem is that this targeting was achieved by simply mailing everybody.

This is why we should probably reformulate this to read:

• Don’t buy from somebody you don’t know
  • (unless it is clear and you can be sure that they did not spam),
• and from those you did not opt in for only if you can opt out easily.

This is not to mean that Coca-Cola can spam everybody, and it is also not to mean that every unsolicited email is spam.

It is my currently best shot at making sure spam doesn’t work while email does freely.

From Heinz Tschabitscher

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