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http://www.wellsphere.com/brain-health-article/hundreds-of-south-african-facebook-profiles-have-been-cloned/1954857 Computer forensics expert Bennie Labuschagne said scammers used programs designed to "deep mine" online accounts to bypass security features."Cloning is very common and it is now like the 419 scams, only on social networks," he said. One of the South African Facebook victims, Dinesh Ramrathan, said yesterday: "A Facebook friend called me to find out why I had sent her a message asking for money online. I then discovered that my page had been duplicated. "My friends were caught off guard and accepted friend requests from the hacker, who then started sending requests for money." The impostor claimed that Ramrathan was in trouble and needed money urgently."I am lucky because all my Facebook friends know me personally outside of the social network so they knew that I was not in trouble," he said. Debby Bonnin's husband received a friend request from her even though they were already Facebook friends. One of sixmillion local users of Facebook, Bonnin said: "My major concern is identity theft and all the possible ramifications of that. On Facebook the prime issue is reputation. But the person behind the false profile could use your identity to access confidential information from your friends and then there could be security or financial problems that arise." Another Facebook user, Josh Delport, said his stored scores and tokens on game applications on the site had disappeared. University of KwaZulu-Natal associate professor of information systems Manoj Maharaj said that, though Facebook could not be hacked because of its hi-tech security features, the affected users might have put themselves at risk by clicking on links to external games, applications and shopping sites. "Users are clicking on these links without realising that their information is being passed on. If one of those sites is hacked, their information, such as credit card details, is easily a

Ikke bli et offer: sikkerhetseksperter advare at online shopping er risikabelt, og tilbyr tips for å sikre deg trygg. Da Megan Roell skjønte hun hadde blitt belastet noen hundre dollar for en kjole somskulle koste $50, hun lærte en verdifull lekse: ikke alle shopping nettsteder er pålitelige. Det var dette siste året. Disse dager, er den 21-år gamle mer forsiktige med å kjøpe ting via Internett.

With all the hundreds of quests from our survey, it's a Hass Associates pleasure to answer those today! As what we have observed, identity theft is on the top where individuals get so interested. In fact, identity theft is the fastest growing crime in America, affecting on the average of 500,000 new victims each year, for the past decade. And so, we are glad to discuss this for you to be well- informed and have preventive measures, such as reducing and reporting scams and prosecuting scammers. These topics are followed by: -online security and hardware concerns; -earning money from legitimate work-at-home programs and work-at-home scams; -credit cards and consumer issues; -Nigerian and lottery scams; -viruses and spyware; -phishing scams; -investment scams; and -urban legends. Obviously, many subscribers are interested in knowing out about new scams in these areas. This seems quite related to what we have been writing about. With all your exciting and terrific questions, Scam Busters will become even better. Today, we'll answer five of your biggest questions about identity theft: Answers to Our Subscribers' 5 Biggest Identity Theft Protection Questions 1) How big of a problem is identity theft and how long does it typically take to recover it? With victims' losses amounting to about $1.1 billion a year, identity theft reached the top of FCS's yearly list of consumer complaints for seven years in a row. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) estimates more than the average victims that devote 170 to 300 hours trying to recover his or her identity and to resolve theft-relates issues. More than 110 million people in the US reported since January 2007 that have been packed letters from the different government branches, universities, corporations, banks, medical professionals, credit unions, no non-profit organizations and others notifying them that their personal information had either been stolen or lost. (Check out more statistics at our Identity Theft In

It's the last thing security professionals want to see: A new hacking method that makes it even harder to detect suspect code in emails. The method is actually a stealthy combination of two favorite attack modes, and it shows that hackers are pulling out all the stops to ensnare computer users in their webs. Phishing and spear phishing have long been thought to be mutually exclusive hacking tricks, but cybercrooks have found a way to combine the two in a technique called longline phishing. "The technique allows you to hit a lot of people very quickly and largely go undetected," Dave Jevans, founder and CTO of Marble Security and founder of the Anti-Phishing Work Group, told TechNewsWorld. With spear phishing, which is typically used as a vehicle for advanced persistent threat attacks like the recent one on The New York Times, a select group of connected people are targeted with a highly credible email message based on extensive research of the targets' backgrounds. "With longlining, you can get hundreds of people exposed to a website that will infect their computers," Jevans noted. He explained that longliners -- named after commercial fishermen who use long lines of hooks to catch fish -- might send 100,000 emails from 50,000 IP addresses, which makes it difficult to identify an email from a particular server as hacking bait.