Once again, the vulnerability of RFID cards is demonstrated while the payment industry insists that it can’t happen.

At a recent hacker conference in Washington, DC one of the speakers, a security researcher, demonstrated the vulnerability of these cards by actually scanning the information of a volunteer’s card, writing it to a bland magnetic strip, and paying herself $15.00

Those of us tat follow this sort of thing have known this for quite some time – it’s no surprise. What concerns me more than the vulnerability is the fact that so many people attending this conference didn’t realize they had RFID cards that needed to be protected. These are security specialists and real hackers. If they don’t know, do you?

Take a look at the logos at the top of this post. Take a look at your credit and debit cards. Look for the words PayWave, PayPass, Zip, Blink or ExpressPay. If you see any of these on any of your cards, you need to protect them now. It can be as simple as a piece of tin foil or a commercially available protector. Just enter “rfid wallet” in your favorite search engine and spring a few bucks.

Article Source

I monitor these sorts of things and I thought I’d share it with all of you. To Mac users, this will come as no surprise but those of you bemoaning all your PC problems, this should be of at least some mild interest.

Macintosh Malware

A company known as F_Secure, who watches the computer malware scene as a big part of what they do, just released the latest statistics on Macintosh malware. No surprise that there was a grand total of ZERO, NADDA, ZILCH viruses OR worms for the Mac in 2011. There were 58 attempts at Trojan horses or backdoor attacks.

By the way, according to the article, there does not seem to be a correlation between the amount of malware for Mac and market share.

Full story can be found here

Windows Malware

On the other side, Windows attacks are still growing at an alarming rate. Compared to 1.5 million malware variants for Windows in 2009 and slightly over a million in the first half of 2010 alone, 58 doesn’t seem so bad. In fact, as the article above puts it, it’s “almost negligibly minuscule.” It almost makes you wonder why Norton and the others even bother to write protection for us Mac folks, but I’m glad they do. There could have been 60!

Breakdown of Windows, Unix and Java malware

Identity theft is on the rise, fueled in part by the crackdown on credit card fraud. You need to protect yourself in a multi-layer approach. In August I reported a serious increase in ID theft related fraud as reported by the Internet Crime Complaint Center. That trend continues.

Security is not a goal, it’s a journey, and you need to do everything you can in an on-going approach to protecting yourself against the scams, especially online. FaceBook, pop-up ads, fake websites, file sharing utilities, phishing email, instant messaging and more are all making you vulnerable whenever you’re connected to the Internet. Right now your computer is giving away more information than you even want to think about. Whenever you use it, you’re leaving behind a trail of information just waiting for an Internet thief.

If you’ve ever bought anything online… If you’ve ever used file-sharing software, such as Limewire or Kazaa… If you’ve ever had popups appear on your screen… If you’ve ever downloaded software from the Internet… If you’ve ever signed up for a PayPal account… Then your computer may contain private information, or be infected by spyware.

We’re all familiar with virus protection software and pop-up blockers. Most of them do an excellent job of what they are designed for, but they can’t protect you completely. Nothing can. You need to take a multi-pronged approach to security.

There is an affordable software package that will help protect you against identity theft. It’s got a pretty straight forward name, “Anti Identity Theft,” and it does what it does very well. It kills adware. It removes tracking cookies. It deletes temporary Windows files and empties your Recycle Bin. It protects critical data such as your credit card details, mother’s maiden name, and full address – and stops Internet thieves, hackers and even nosy family members from accessing your private information.

Why not take a look at Anti Identity Theft and decide for yourself?

A recent article on the FBI news site indicates that ATM card skimming is on the rise. The bad guys are getting very sophisticated and building skimmers that are virtually undetectable unless you are looking for them. The article tells how it’s done and how to detect if the ATM you’re using is fitted with skimming devices.

There has been a significant increase in credit card fraud and other related ID theft related crime. Research shows that it’s preventable. Card holders just need to be careful.

Over at Merchant911 we monitor credit card fraud trends pretty carefully. What we’ve seen in the last month or so is a serious increase in fraud attempts. Careful analysis by the FBI and other Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) related experts show that the timing of this fraud surge is similar to others that occur after a natural disaster such as the recent tsunami in Japan.

As we reported after the Haitian disasterfake relieve sites pop up all over the Internet. They exist solely for the purpose of stealing your hard-earned money. Now we have correlating data for this.

Prevention is simple. Only donate to charitable groups who’s reputation you know. Don’t be fooled by emails sent out that appear to originate from ANY group. Many times, they will look authentic but they most likely are not. They were set up to get your credit card information.

Be careful. It can be an ugly world out there.