Re: Internet Hoaxes

> Any chance you could give us a summary of the worst of these scams?
>  Personally, I'm more concerned with financial hits..

There's a lot of stuff that hurts end users who are not wise to what is
likely to be a scam ... an estimated $ 5 billion dollars have gone to the
perpetrators of the Nigerian Scam.  In my opinion, you & I are not at risk of
this because we know better, but if we have people working at our company who
are the kind of people who run mail attachments without first virus checking
them, pass along hoaxes just in case this is a true story, and if those
people have access to corporate banking account numbers, then there is a risk
that they will fall for that kind of scam leading to the draining of your
corporate bank accounts.

There are a lot of scams like that, that some individuals are vulnerable to,
and some such individuals may work at your company, thus placing the whole
company at risk.

If you go to
http://www.pcworld.com/features/article/0,aid,75204,00.asp
PCWorld.com = The Worst Internet Hoaxes

and print this out, it is basically 2 pages in which they have a summary of
their top 10 list.  FTC has a similar list & basically the problem is that
scam artists have learned that humans are particularly vulnerable to certain
types of con games, so they keep coming up with variations.  Some people can
be taught that "help a sick kid" is probably a fraud, ie. certain phrases are
associated with some scams, but cannot be taught how to recognize the fraud
when it reappears using a different set of phrases.  There are some good
links here & I shared a bunch in my earlier post.  I can also share more.

One problem not in the PC World article, that I have mentioned in earlier
posts to other lists, is what I call the Banking Virus Trojan.  Let's suppose
you are engaged in Electronic Commerce in which you are doing some Electronic
Banking.  You have Trading Partners with whom money is transferred
electronically ... think check book except on-line.  You pay your bills
on-line, the money transferred from your bank account to their bank account.
They pay you the same way.

Now various enterprises involved in this will have different computer
systems, different software, different security, different levels of
corporate employee awareness of good practices.  Along comes the Banking
Virus Trojan and infects a company you doing business with & it captures all
the information needed to do financial transactions with you & everyone else
they doing business with.  The Banking Virus Trojan then initiates funds
transfers from all your accounts to that of the cracker, via various cut-outs.

It is like DDS, where 911 gets taken down & the authorities can only find the
PCs that were infected by the trojans, not the crackers responsible.  Well
with the Banking Virus Trojan, the money cannot be traced to who really has
it.  As far as the Bank is concerned, all the transactions were legitimate,
insurance does not cover this.  But all your money is gone.

It gets worse.  The cracker still has your bank account information, so if
you able to stay in business & do business with the same bank(s) they can hit
you again, even if you have all new bank account numbers.

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)