The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) recently released their report on 2009 Internet crime statistics.  As you can probably guess, there were more complaints, more losses, higher average loss per incident.  IC3 is a federally funded non-profit, a joint operation between the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C).
In brief:

Complaints received:  336,655
Total loss:  [...]

A world wide phishing attack on carbon emissions trading registries forced registries in nine countries to shut down, while in other countries trading was temporarily suspended.  Fake registries (phishing sites) were set up by a group of criminals who then sent out messages to thousands of users in different companies, making off with about 250,000 [...]

Two studies show that young people are more likely to be victims of online fraud.  You’d think that since most of them have not experienced a world without Internet and email, they’d be more knowledgeable about phishing and other schemes.  But the insurance group CPP reports that the 16 to 24 age group is most [...]

This year’s Consumer Electronics Show brought us some interesting trends and ideas.   In his review of the show, Lance Ulanoff lists 9 things he’s learned there.  In the last point in that post, he makes the observation that “the marriage of technology and content took center stage”.
There is a fundamental change in how we’ve been [...]

Is anyone really surprised that two of the top security threats expected in 2010 have to do with social engineering and mobile media? Hackers live in the same world we do, and they naturally gravitate toward any media that is widely used. As social networking becomes more widely accepted – especially by businesses and civic [...]

The FBI is advising small businesses – the same ones often operating on a shoestring – to use a dedicated PC for their online banking. It would seem that hackers are targeting small businesses, universities, and local businesses with keylogging malware – that is, software that records the keystrokes typically used to enter a password, [...]

Did you see this? Christian Harris put up a nice blog last week calling alphanumeric logins obsolete. Thanks for the shout-out Christian.
The same article tells us that identity theft is up 33.1%, according to CIFAS, and that’s before taking into account the increase in fraud that we expect over the holidays. It seems that come [...]