Agape Blog

VASCO Data Security Inc. announced DIGIPASS as a Service (DaaS) authentication model. The company expands its offering to Application Service Providers (ASP) and SaaS vendors. This newest service solution from VASCO offers a complete platform incorporating the user, the enterprise and e-commerce. Today many service providers face high costs to add strong authentication. DIGIPASS as a Service allows customers to secure access to their webmail, network, ERP and CRM systems with one DIGIPASS. The DaaS authentication service enables the user to access their online bank, credit cards, webmail, buy tickets over the Internet, play games and access his/her social network account with one DIGIPASS. DIGIPASS comes as a blessing because this service will exempt the user from remembering endless passwords for various online activities. With one DIGIPASS it will be possible for the user to access countless applications. For application owners and companies too, the benefits of DaaS are many. DIGIPASS as a Service offers on demand identity and transaction security. This application has a high value to the end user. VASCO believes, all online applications have the right to be protected with best-of-breed authentication.

Multi LinkWorld Service Ltd, Mumbai (website : http://www.multilinkworld.com/) is a fraudulent company. They lure customers with their highly cost effective offers on ticket and hotel booking by promoting heavily in reputed newspapers and franchise Magazine across different states. Once the party pay the amount, no one get any acknowledgements, updates or any comments in return. Investing your hard earned money in company like Multi Link World Service Ltd is nothing but throwing it in the well. So Just Beware of such FRAUDULENTS COMPANY.

Not astonishingly, we found that most of the services we tested minimally did not provide us with the information that they claimed they would.

The majority of the services gave us little more than the name itself. often with an address that was obsolete or inaccurate. With claims of being able to provide us with full employment history, criminal records, credit history, and much more, we were sad to see that in most cases after all was said and done, we could have found the alike information in the local phone book!

Although most of the services we reviewed fell short of our expectations, we recommend you to choose a service that truly stood out from the crowd which would provide you nearly all the information you are looking for… including extensive contact info (email addresses, phone numbers, and both work and home addresses), criminal records, credit history, residential history, and extensive employment history. And basic information for:

When should you report the Cyber Crime?
• Spyware
• Phishing
• Spam
• Identity Theft
• Online Shopping Fraud

Spyware: Spyware can steal your credit card numbers and passwords. Switch your home page, or re-direct your web searches to unwanted sites. Display annoying ads, slow your PC to a crawl, or even control it remotely. If you think your computer has spyware, report cyber crime.

Phishing: Phishing is an e-mail fraud method in which the perpetrator sends out legitimate-looking email in an attempt to gather personal and financial information from recipients. Typically, the messages appear to come from well known and trustworthy Web sites. Store e-mail spam that phish for information about your company, bank, or organization. Lodge your cyber crime & forward the respective email information.

Spam: Spam is unwanted, invasive Internet advertising, typically for get-rich-quick schemes, or probable scams. Spam consumes your resources. Networks of virus-infected computers, Botnets (number of Internet computers that, although their owners are unaware of it, have been set up to forward transmissions including spam or viruses to other computers on the Internet) are used to send about 80% of spam. E-mail addresses are collected from chartrooms, websites, newsgroups, and viruses which harvest users’ address books, and are sold to other spammers. Much of spam is sent to invalid e-mail addresses. Report your complain & forward the respective message.

Identity Theft: It is a term used to refer to fraud that involves someone pretending to be someone else in order to steal money or get other benefits. The term is relatively new and is actually a misnomer, since it is not inherently possible to steal an identity, only to use it. The person whose identity is used can suffer various consequences when he or she is held responsible for the perpetrator’s actions. If your information has been misused, file a report about your identity theft.

Online Shopping Fraud: If you have problems during a transaction, try to work them out directly with the seller, buyer or the website operator. If that does fails, file your complaint.

Jayesh Bellani
Executive: Fraud Management System
Agape Inc

With the ongoing cyber related threats turning bigger, more sophisticated and deadlier, it is time to rethink & relook every single click you make while surfing on the Internet.

It is critical to know these lurking threats so that you don’t fall prey to scamsters and fraudsters and compromise your security and money. Below is a list of some of the common tricks played by scammers.

1) `You have not paid for the item you recently won on eBay. Please click here to pay.’
2) `You’ve been let go. Click here to register for severance pay.’
3) `This mail is (name of the person) from tech services. Your PC is infected.’
4) `Someone has a secret crush on you! Click on this link to find who it is!
5) `Did you see this video of you? Check out this link!’
6) `Please confirm this order’
7) `Check out our new Discount menu’
`I’m traveling and I’ve lost my wallet. Can you wire some money?

For detailed information visit http://infotech.indiatimes.com/quickiearticleshow/4249057.cms

Travelers are especially vulnerable to hackers because they often use computers and Wi-Fi networks in hotel lobbies, cafes and airports.

Here are some steps you can take to protect yourself:

Create a strong password. As e-mail is easier to hack with weak password.

Another solution is to create a dedicated e-mail account for use on the road, with a password that is different from passwords you use for bank and credit card information. Let your contacts know you’ll be using that account while on vacation. You can stay in touch, but if someone does hack into your account, they only get your vacation pictures.

If using a shared computer, try to cover your tracks. On Microsoft’s Explorer, when you log off, go to “Tools” and “Delete Browsing History” to remove traces of your passwords and the Web sites you’ve visited.

Sniffing a wireless network is really easy to do — any teen in junior high can do it. Such vulnerabilities can yield mayhem with attacks known as “Packet Sniffing,” ”Man in the Middle” attacks and “MAC Spoofing.”

Also when you are using your laptop in a public place, you obviously want up-to-date security programs.

You should also disable file-sharing on your laptop, and also a good idea to turn off Bluetooth, printer-sharing and disable ad hoc network connections.

You should not send any sensitive data while in travelling. That’s because many e-mail services and browser connections essentially broadcast in the clear, meaning someone can eavesdrop on information sent to and from your computer. If you want to be careful, that means avoiding banking, shopping and checking credit card accounts. Even though these sites usually encrypt your data, there are some workarounds a determined hacker could use.

If you want to take your computer security a step up, consider a VPN, or Virtual Private Network i.e. it’s a tunnel, where all your communication is encrypted. A passive attacker can’t intercept.

Anup Srivastava
Executive: Fraud Management Services
Agape Inc

Have you heard of this? A number of scams are coming to light now-a-days through the web. One of them is known as the Craigslist scam. Craigslist is a centralized network of online communities with free online classified advertisements like jobs, housing, personals, for sale, services, community, gigs, résumés, and great resource for selling things, finding apartments, locating services and meeting people etc. It is an upcoming and a great service but it never comes with some risk. If you deal with people you aren’t meeting face to face you risk getting scammed.

The buyer and seller on Craigslist are not alert to the danger or deception. Most of these scams follow the same pattern that we see on eBay and other online auction sites. Try posting some easily-mailed valuable item for sale and the first response you get will probably be someone trying to trick you into believing it’s true.

Advice on avoiding scams to people using Craigslist service-

• Deal locally with folks you can meet in
• Never wire funds online, money gram or any other wire service - anyone who asks you to do so is a scammer.
• Fake cashier checks & money orders are common, and banks will cash them and then hold you responsible when the fake is discovered weeks later.
• Never give out financial information (bank account number, social security number, eBay/PayPal info, etc.)
• Avoid deals involving shipping or escrow services and know that ONLY A SCAMMER WILL “GUARANTEE” YOUR TRANSACTION.

Michelle Mitra
Executive: Fraud Management System
Agape Inc

Fraudulent activities (Lottery Scam E-mail) on the Internet are increasing with an alarming rate. However, you must always be aware of the existence of fraudsters on the Internet - cunning operators completely focused on financial gain and their tactics vary.These are frequently circulated with the Purpose to :

1). Persuade the victim to part with personal information to allow the scammers to carry out Identity Theft.
2). Persuade the victim to part with money as an up front payment in order to release a winning Lottery prize which does not exist.

The following points are some tips to look for in order to identify and avoid lottery fraud and scams :
• You did not buy a ticket.
• You are asked to pay money up front for fees or taxes in order to release your “win.”
• You do not live in the country and you are not a citizen of the country of that lottery.
• You are normally asked to contact an “Agent” or “Processing Officer”
• Contact email addresses may be used that are obviously not from a company, such as blahblah- lotto@hotmail.com - How many legitimate companies do you think would use that type of email for their business?
• You are told you must reply within a given time or the money will be given to someone else.
• Spoof websites can be difficult to spot.
• To convince the recipient, emails attached with fake Winning Certificate on behalf of Beneficiary

The following are a few suggestions on how to protect yourself.
• Never provide personal or financial information.
• Don’t be drawn into making an ‘up front’ payment for a lottery prize that probably doesn’t exist.
• Beware of links which could lead you to so-called ‘spoof sites’ set up to extract information from you, like updating personal records which could provide the means to reach or even access your account.
• Whenever you want to discuss your account with e-lottery, we will always verify your identity by asking specific security questions. Our customer care team do not have access to your full password.

So if you ever have any doubts about an email – Be Careful. If you ever have concerns about lottery scams don’t hesitate to CONTACT US ON OUR 365*24*7 TOLL FREE NUMBER at 1800 209 6789 (For India Only) Or visit us at www.agapeinc.in. We are always here to help you.

Jayesh Bellani
Executive: Fraud Management System
Agape Inc

If you should ever be forced by a robber to withdraw money from an ATM machine, you can notify the police by entering your PIN in reverse. Though it hasn’t been tried in many places, this technology if present will help the banks and its customers.

Let’s say for example, if your pin number is 5678 then you would put in 8765. The ATM recognizes that your pin number is backwards from the ATM card you placed in the machine. The machine will still give you the money you requested, but unknown to the robber, the police will be immediately dispatched to help you.

Now the question arises that 1) what if the pin number happens to be a palindrome? Say 3333, 1221, 6226 and so on. 2) what if the ‘reversed’ pin happens to be somebody else’s pin. 3) Even if the police is dispatched for help, it would take them some time to get to the ATM and by then the harm would have been done. 4) ATM machines are not that intelligent to recognize whether a pin has been reversed entered; it only recognizes the correct pin matching the card.

Each card is paired with a unique pin number, entering the wrong pin would clearly not be matching with the card and therefore no transaction would go through.

Sherwin Azavedo
Manager: Cyber Crime Complaints
Agape Inc.

The month of March in recent years has set email volume records, but this March is well off the pace. Last year we saw an average of 153 billion messages per day, while this March averaged only about 100 billion messages per day, as per the report issued by McAfee.

The McColo network was not only the large source of spam in the US, but also trafficked in child pornography and malware. McColo a web hosting firm identified by the computer security community as a major host of organizations engaged in spam activity was unplugged. Researchers estimated that spam levels dropped about 60 percent after McColo was closed.

E-mail security firm IronPort said spam levels fell by roughly 66 percent. Spamcop.net, another spam watch dog, found a similar decline, from about 40 spam e-mails per second to around 10 per second after the web hosting company was unplugged.

McAfee detected nearly twelve million new IP addresses operating as “zombies,” computers under the control of spammers and others. This is a significant increase over the levels from the last quarter of 2008, with an increase of nearly 50 percent. The third quarter of 2008 also posted a record number of new zombies, but it was exceeded this quarter by one million. And although the spam volume levels have not yet recovered from the McColo shutdown, the activity level of new zombies indicates that the spammers are working hard to regain the infrastructure lost and that volumes will return to previous levels sometime soon.

View McAfee Threats Report: First Quarter 2009 here.

While most viruses target PC users, there has been a considerable rise in the number of attacks on Mac systems.

Recently two new attacks (worms) have been identified by experts from porn sites attacking Mac users directly known as Mac OS-X malware. What it does is that visitors to the malicious porn site are told they have to download an ActiveX component to view the videos and users get redirected to the pagemac.php page, which downloads a QuickTime.dmg file (a Trojan) dubbed OSX/Jahlav-C, gets downloaded. Read more…