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Robert Siciliano

Security Analyst

Safr.me

Member since

04 Feb 2009

Location

Boston

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Robert's opinions

The Switch to the Chip Card - One Year Later

The October anniversary of the liability shift has passed, and anniversaries are an excellent time to look back on progress…this is no exception. The U.S. EMV migration plan was set four years ago as a way to fight card fraud and to protect both consumers and merchants. Back in the day, we had one choice when we wanted to purchase something, and t...

02 November 2016 /security

Fake Realtor scams Children and their Parents

Ever peruse Craigslist for a new home? Nothing against Craigslist for doing that, but that’s where Coty Houston and David Yost happened to find a very alluring four-bed home for sale; looked perfect for their five young kids. Then they all got squashed by a bomb: The man who sold it to them was not a licensed Realtor. Matthew Boros, however, used t...

30 August 2016 /security

32 Million Twitter Pass for sale Add two-factor NOW

The Dark Web, according to LeakedSource, got ahold of 33 million Twitter account details and put them up for sale. Twitter thus locked the accounts for millions of users. Twitter, however, doesn’t believe its servers were directly attacked. So what happened? The bad guys may have created a composite of data from other breached sources. Or, they cou...

21 July 2016 /security

Phone Account of FTC Chief Technologist hijacked

An impostor posed as Lorrie Cranor at a mobile phone store (in Ohio, nowhere near Cranor’s home) and obtained her number. She is the Federal Trade Commission’s chief technologist. Her impostor’s con netted two new iPhones (the priciest models—and the charges went to Cranor) with her number. In a blog post, Cranor writes: “My phones immediately sto...

14 July 2016 /security

Viruses as Cyberweapons for sale

It’s all about code—the building blocks of the Internet. Software code is full of unintentional defects. Governments are paying heavy prices to skilled hackers who can unearth these vulnerabilities, says an article at nytimes.com. In fact, the FBI director, James B. Comey, recommended that the FBI pay hackers a whopping $1.3 million to figure out h...

12 July 2016 /security

TeamViewer Clients Victims of other Hack Attacks

Get an account with TeamViewer, and you will have a software package that enables remote control, online meetings, desktop sharing and other functions between computers. But recently, customers of TeamViewer have reported remote takedowns of their computers that resulted in different forms of monetary theft, such as bank accounts being cleaned out....

08 July 2016 /security

Can Two-Factor Authentication actually fail?

You’ve probably read many times that two-factor authentication is a superb extra layer of protection against a thief hacking into your accounts, because gaining access requires entering a One Time Passcode (OTP)—sent via text or voice—into a login field. In other words, no phone, no access. But CAN a hacker get the phone? Ask Deray McKesson, an ac...

06 July 2016 /security

Identity Theft getting even worse

In 2015, depending on the kind and type of identity theft we are talking about, identity thieves impacted 1.5 million people or more, says the Javelin Strategy & Research report. That’s more than double than for 2014. The move from stripe cards to chip cards has motivated crooks to fasten their seatbelts and really take off with an accelerate...

01 July 2016 /security

Carders cashing out on Magstrip Cards

Two thousand credit card payment terminals stand to become infected with malware called Trinity point of sales. Ten million credit cards were stolen by hackers, called Fin6, who may end up scoring $400 million. The cards were stolen from retail and hospitality businesses. If each card sells for $21 on secret carder shops, you can see how the hacker...

30 June 2016 /security

Hacking Humans is Painfully Easy

Hackers can take over someone’s life in a matter of hours. Just ask Patsy Walsh. Though she is not a tech savvy person, the grandmother of six did have a Facebook account, and that was all the hackers needed to take over her life. By using methods such as click baiting, the act of convincing someone to click on a fake link, and then gathering info...

28 June 2016 /security

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