Tag Archives: APWG

Botnets and Reputation Ranking at APWG in San Francisco 2013-09-17

On the agenda for APWG eCrime Tuesday 17 September 2013 in San Francisco:

Birds of a Feather (BOF)
Botnet Data Exchange for Botnet Node Remediation and Network Reputation Ranking
–Pat Cain, APWG
–John S. Quarterman, Quarterman Creations

I’ll be talking about SpamRankings.net among other reputational rankings.

APWG PR of 29 August 2013 says:

Global cybercrime-fighting association APWG is hosting its eCrime 2013 members meeting and research conference in San Francisco next month to launch its second decade of leading the global engagement with cybercrime, assembling commercial leaders from multinational technology and financial services companies, government and law enforcement agencies and industrial and academic researchers from around the world to update the global agenda for the long-term containment of the cybercrime scourge.
This is the tenth year of APWG, and the seventh year of the eCrime Researchers Summit.

I presented at Continue reading →

You can help Stop-eCrime

Stop-eCrime aims to reduce electronic crime by increasing transparency of information and communications technologies.

Born out of 2010 meetings organized by the Anti-Phishing Working Group and the IEEE Standards Association, Stop-eCrime has already been working on ecrime event data exchange standards and protocols, as well as operational protocols for dealing with computers compromised by ecrime.

Now Stop-eCrime wants you to help tie these technical and operational levels together into an ecrime detection and response system coordinated among the public, business, academia, and government. There’s plenty of work to be done on technical standards and operational protocols (such as glossaries, metrics, and monetary effects), plus Stop-eCrime needs educational materials and marketing to explain incentives for everyone to participate in reducing ecrime.

Here are the details.

If you want to help, or if you have questions, contact:

https://mentor.ieee.org/stop-ecrime
Chair: Paul Laudanski <paul@laudanski.com>

-jsq

Crossing the Street in Cyberspace: Michael Kaiser and the National Cyber Security Alliance

If you grew up in a small town, you’d likely cross the street without stopping to look each way. Try that in New York City, and you’ll end up in the hospital. Similarly, most of us grew up in meatspace and clicking on any old link in cyberspace often ends up with our bank account in the hospital.

OK, that was my mangled simile, but it illustrates what Michael Kaiser and the National Security Alliance are trying to do: educate the public about what to do and not do in cyberspace without losing their audience with technical details or lengthy pedantic instructions. In his talk at APWG he had all sorts of interesting points, such as address different audiences (K-12, small business, elderly, etc.) differently, and that it’s not just unlearning bad habits (including ones that would be good habits in other contexts), it’s teaching good habits. ANd changing habits of any kind requires repetition and persistence. As Kaiser said, look at the CDC and its ongoing campaigns of prevention of HIV, domestic violence, etc.

Personally, I think staysafeonline.org could use more graphics and less text, or, more importantly, more storyline. It seems a tad pedantic to me. More poets in prevention! Or more marketing in staying safe. Or something.

But it’s a useful site already.

Teachable Moment: APWG/CMU Phishing Education Landing Page program

Phishing? Fail!

When you take down a phishing domain or server, don’t just take it off the net: redirect it to this education page so victims of phishing can learn in the act of being suckered by a phisher that they should be more careful what they click on.

As someone in the audience pointed out, whatever you do don’t redirect phishing pages back to the actual sites being phished, i.e., if the phisher was pretending to be a bank, don’t take down the phisher’s redirect and replace it with a redirect to the bank itself. THat just teaches people the wrong thing, to follow a bad link.

Instead, link to the APWG/CMU landing page. Which could use a catchier name (how about Phishing: Fail!), but it’s already a really good service.

APWG Atlanta Buckhead

apwgfall08.jpg Five years of the Anti-Phishing Working Group! Dave Jevans gave a retrospective, followed by country reports:

Japan: Pretending to be grandchild to get bank account transfer is popular. ATM scams are the most lucrative.

Russia: Second biggest global source of spam. Ecrime economy is ten times the si ze of the anti-ecrime industry, and that’s a problem.

Brazil: Most phishing is done locally. Is all organized crime.

I don’t want to go into too much detail, even though the bad guys don’t seem to need any help. APWG continues to climb the ecrimeware curve, catching up with th e miscreants.