Information

Here’s how to know you have fallen victim to a scam – and what to do in order to undo or mitigate the damage. Online fraud can be thought of as a price we pay for the ubiquity of digital services. These services make our lives easier, healthier, safer and more entertaining. But there are countless scammers out there waiting to steal our identities and money. Their ingenuity, our credulity and poor corporate security combine…

by Paul Ducklin Linux has never suffered from the infamous BSoD, short for blue screen of death, the name given to the dreaded “something went terribly wrong” message associated with a Windows system crash. Microsoft has tried many things over the years to shake that nickname “BSoD”, including changing the background colour used when crash messages appear, adding a super-sized sad-face emoticon to make the message feel more compassionate, displaying QR codes that you can…

Here’s a roundup of some of the most common tricks that fraudsters use to dupe their victims on WhatsApp – and what you can do to protect yourself against them. With more than two billion users, WhatsApp offers a vast pool of potential targets for scammers. To make things more complicated, fraudsters aren’t known for resting on their laurels – instead, they’re learning new and sophisticated social engineering skills to entrap us in their trickery.…

A request to move an online conversation to a supposedly more secure platform may not be as well-meaning as it sounds Have you ever been asked to move an online conversation to another – and supposedly more secure – platform? This technique, often used by romance scammers, was recently used against a number of Indian and Pakistani netizens, possibly with a military or political background. The targeted campaign – courtesy of the Transparent Tribe APT…

by Paul Ducklin Chinese “fast fashion” brand SHEIN is no stranger to controversy, not least because of a 2018 data breach that its then-parent company Zoetop failed to spot, let alone to stop, and then handled dishonestly. As Letitia James, Attorney General of the State of New York, said in a statement at the end of 2022: SHEIN and [sister brand] ROMWE’s weak digital security measures made it easy for hackers to shoplift consumers’ personal…