Cafaro's Ramblings

Ok first good story I’ve heard about spammers, though it’s not all good news. Apparently there are some card scammers that use stolen credit card numbers to buy goods and get paid by spammers and then run with the goods and the cash to let the spammers deal with the chargebacks and indentity fraud investigations. 🙂  So, it’s good in that it cost spammers money and makes their lives harder, bad in that it’s at the price and annoyance of people who have had their credit cards numbers stolen.

You can read more about it here:

Carders scam spammers – The Register

or here:

How Many Spams Can a Scammer Scam If a Spammer Can Scam Spams? – The Washington Post

Here is a very good article about Security researchers going to jail for doing the right thing. They find a flaw in some instituition/company website, one that exposes valuable or personal information, and they do the good deed and tell the instituition/company about the flaw allowing them to fix it (which most likely they would never have found on their own until some bad guy came in and stole all the information and banckrupted them and their customers/clients). So how do they say thanks to the good guy? They take him to court and sue him for computer intrusion. This is so very backward thinking, and shows how badly they DONT understand security. If I found out a business did this I would not want to be associated with them or in any kind of financial/priviledged relationship with them. They are destined to fail and leak out my information to the real bad guys cause they don’t take security seriously, they are only concerned with their image (which apparently they don’t protect very well either).

Anyway, it’s a good read, and hopefully instituition will learn that they want these researchers on their side, not against them, or worse, out of the picture completely (which affects all of us).

Breach case could curtail web flaw finders

Time to run the update cycle. Some fairly significant security holes were found in most all of the Mozilla Foundations products. These security holes could allow someone to run any program they want on your computer as the user you are logged in as. Please go upgrade/update now.

More information here.