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Category: Pet Scams

WHOIS, Proxies and the GDPR – how consumers lost Security and Privacy

WHOIS, Proxies and the GDPR – how consumers lost Security and Privacy

Artists Against 419 has to say this very clearly: There can be no consumer privacy and security while ICANN Registrars are the custodians of trust on the internet. ICANN has allowed a situation to develop that’s had the exact opposite effect of what the European privacy regulators aimed for, the protection of natural consumer privacy. In turn, this has further not only created a situation where consumers may be trivially deprived of privacy, but also security. Let’s look at this situation with quick examples.

DNS Abuse Dominoes

DNS Abuse Dominoes

While ICANN, the regulators and the various interest groups are debating the definitions of DNS abuse, what constitutes a security threat and is within their responsibility (or rather not), what’s wrong in this area, fraudsters don’t care about these shenanigans. They’re exploiting DNS to their own advantage in well defined illegal activities. The rules made when the Internet was young, seems unable to keep the steps with current realities. The divide between the ideal Internet in the regulators’ model and…

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Avast highlights the failing in consumer protection

Avast highlights the failing in consumer protection

Sometimes we can learn a lot from what experts in their field of operation publish. Ironically we saw this yesterday again when Avast, a large anti-virus vendor, quoted an article by John Wasik on Forbes: All online scams have one thing in common: They want to tap your greed to get at personal information they can steal. These “phishing” ruses are happening 24/7. A typical banking scam will ask for information so the scammer can access anything from your credit…

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Malicious Domains: Heroes and Facilitators

Malicious Domains: Heroes and Facilitators

In a new pending report from the United States Better Business Bureau, they are looking at a new plague that’s hit the United States and the world. While we will not steal their thunder in this most excellent report and the revelations contained in it, it does illustrate certain underlying issues, malicious domains controlled from West Africa. Let’s get some facts straight: A domain registered by a malicious party for malicious purposes, is malicious. This is simple undeniable logic. Such…

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Understanding the Cameroonian Pet Scam

Understanding the Cameroonian Pet Scam

In a previous article we mentioned that not much is known about the Cameroonian Pet Scam or this type of fraud emanating from West Africa. We mentioned the pet scam, the weed scam and stolen credit card details. This article quickly looks at one scammer found that will illustrate this type of cyber-crime.