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The website Songsrpeople.com looks a lot like other amateur-video sites. It is wallpapered with clips featuring "the most insane amusement park ever" and "your girlfriend's six friends." The site draws tens of thousands of visitors a month, according to audience measurement firms. It also has ads for national brands, including Target Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and State Farm. But Web-security investigators at a firm called White Ops contend that most of the site's visitors aren't people. Rather, they are computer-generated visitors, or "bots," designed to fool advertisers into paying for the traffic, says White Ops, which has blacklisted the site-and thousands more like it-so that ads from clients such as Zipcar don't land there. An anonymous representative for Songsrpeople declined to discuss the site's traffic but in an email called the White Ops methodology into question. State Farm said it was looking into the matter while Target declined to comment and Amazon didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. Authorities and Internet-security experts say tens of thousands of dubious websites are popping up across the Internet. Their phony Web traffic is often fueled by "botnets," zombie armies of hijacked PCs that are controlled from unknown locations around the world, according to Internet security experts. The sites take advantage of the simple truth that advertisers pay to be seen. This creates an incentive for fraudsters to erect sites with phony traffic, collecting payments-often through middlemen and sometimes directly from advertisers. "When you walk into this world, you walk with eyes wide open," said Brian Harrington, chief marketing officer at Zipcar, which ran a recent ad campaign, assisted by White Ops to filter out bogus traffic. "You know stuff is not real." At their most sophisticated, botnets can mimic the behavior of online consumers, clicking from one site to the next, pausing at ads, watching videos, and even putting items in shopp

http://hass-and-associates-cyber-security.blogspot.com/2013/02/malware.html Malware is a malicious software made to collect sensitive data, access secured systems or disrupt operations. It is a collective term for spyware, adware, worms, virus, trojan horses and any intrusive, hostile or nuisance programs. This malicious program would normally be disguised as or comes along with legit software. It is not uncommon for safe programs to be bundled with malware so that a user will unknowingly install it into a system. The basic characteristics of a malware is that it must be hidden and run without being seen or deleted. Any program with malicious code that can trick users into installing and running it is considered a malware. Trojan horses are commonly known in their disguise as something beneficial or normal so users unwittingly install them. They are commonly bundled with legit software that can be downloaded online and users install them not knowing that a harmful program is being installed at the same time. Classified as a malware, virus is a software that will replicate and spread among all other executable files in a system. It should not be confused with the worm because the latter is capable of automatically transferring itself across the network in order to infect other systems. Rootkits usually act through altering the registry of the operating system itself in order to stay hidden and keep the other malware processes from being displayed in the process list. They also secure malware files by locking them (so it won't be deleted) or foiling attempts to kill the malicious processes by replicating them quickly. Backdoors work through bypassing the usual authentication system and gain remote access to it while keeping under the radar. And once a system is penetrated, other backdoors could be installed for easier access. More Info: http://www.yelp.com/biz/hass-and-associates-cyber-security-alcobendas

hass associates review articles Think the Internet Leads to Growth? Think Again Remember the year 2000 in the months after the Y2K bug had been crushed, when all appeared smooth sailing in the global economy? When the miracle of finding information online was so novel that The Onion ran an article, "Area Man Consults Internet Whenever Possible?" It was a time of confident predictions of an ongoing economic and political renaissance powered by information technology. Jack Welch-then the lauded chief executive officer of General Electric (GE)-had suggested the Internet was "the single most important event in the U.S. economy since the Industrial Revolution." The Group of Eight highly industrialized nations-at that point still relevant-met in Okinawa in 2000 and declared, "IT is fast becoming a vital engine of growth for the world economy. … Enormous opportunities are there to be seized by us all." In a 2000 report, then-President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers suggested (PDF), "Many economists now posit that we are entering a new, digital economy that could inaugurate an unprecedented period of sustainable, rapid growth." It hasn't quite worked out that way. Indeed, if the last 10 years have demonstrated anything, it's that for all the impact of a technology like the Internet, thinking that any new innovation will set us on a course of high growth is almost certainly wrong. That's in part because many of the studies purporting to show a relationship between the Internet and economic growth relied on shoddy data and dubious assumptions. In 1999 the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland released a study that concluded (PDF), "… the fraction of a country's population that has access to the Internet is, at least, correlated with factors that help to explain average growth performance." It did so by demonstrating a positive relationship between the number of Internet users in a country in 1999 with gross domestic product g

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.

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