Safe Tips to avoid Mobile Phone related Cyber Crime

• Use only mobile phones having SIM Card registered by the owner only.
• Purchase Mobile Phone having IMEI Number and which was marked in the bill.
• Never hand over SIM card to other people.
• Purchase Mobile Phones from genuine dealers / sellers.
• If you are buying second hand mobile set, you should make sure about its genuineness and purchased only from genuine dealers / seller with original bills and other related documents.
• Inform Local Police immediately about loss of mobile phone, SIM Cards etc. and obtain receipt from there.

Tips for a safe cyber tread

Beware of debit card skimmers

Police in at least two cities advise consumers not to use their debit
card at a gas pump because there’s no way to be sure it hasn’t been
tampered with.
By Herb Weisbaum
MSNBC
Becki Turner got the call from her bank’s fraud department on Labor
Day. The investigator wanted to know if she had withdrawn $500 from an
ATM in California over the holiday weekend. She hadn’t. She couldn’t.
Turner was home in Puyallup, Wash.

“I was just flabbergasted,” she says. “I had the card with me, the ATM
was in another state, and the person using the machine had to have my
security code.” Turner worried crooks had gotten into the banking
system and stolen her password.

It wasn’t anything that complicated. Puyallup police say thieves
snagged her account information — along with the debit card numbers
and PIN codes of hundreds of other people — at two gas stations in the
area.

They did it by installing their own hard-to-spot card reader, called a
skimmer, on top of the card reader built into the pump. The skimmer is
able to grab the account information from the card without interfering
with the legitimate payment transaction.

The crooks used the stolen data to create (or clone) fake debit cards
that were used at ATMs in Washington State over the Fourth of July
weekend and in Northern California on Labor Day weekend. The bad guys
like three-day holidays because it gives them more time to use the
cards before the unauthorized withdrawals are spotted.

“We are looking at a sophisticated, very well-organized group of
individuals,” says Detective Jason Visnaw with the Puyallup Police
Department. When all the victims from these two incidents are
identified, the total loss could reach half a million dollars.

Why steal debit card numbers? “With a credit card you have to go and
buy merchandise and then you have to fence it or pawn it,” Det. Visnaw
explains. “With a debit card, you’re getting cash money.”

This is not an isolated case. Gas pumps are being compromised in
cities across the country. “We don’t view it as an epidemic, but there
are cases open in at least a half dozen states right now,” says Ed
Donovan, spokesman for the U.S. Secret Service. These investigations
are underway in California, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Delaware and
Washington.

Donovan tells me the Secret Service believes some of these crimes are
inside jobs, involving someone at the service station.

Gas pumps are just the latest target

Skimming credit cards and debit cards is not new. Portable card
readers make it possible for anyone to copy the information stored on
a card’s magnetic stripe. This information is not encrypted so it’s
easy to steal.

“You just run it through the skimmer and it has all the information
right there in plain text,” says former White House cyber security
advisor Howard Schmidt. “It’s very easy to imprint that data on
another magnetic strip and use it somewhere else.”

The first skimming cases were reported at restaurants and stores where
dishonest employees ran cards through their reader before ringing up
the sale. As technology improved, the bad guys developed skimmers for
ATMs. Now they’ve added gas pumps.

The skimmers are designed to slip over the real card reader. They can
be hard to spot. And quite frankly, most of us would never look for
something like this anyway. We want to pay and go.

So how do they get your PIN number? They can hide a little camera in
the skimmer or on the pump. It shows your fingers as you type in the
number.

There are also fake keypads that slip over the real keypad that can
transmit the PIN code as you enter it.

In Las Vegas, police have discovered even more sophisticated
technology – wireless transmitters installed inside the pump. “They
can actually sit in the parking lot with a laptop and get real-time
information as victims use their card,” explains Lt. Robert Sebby of
the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Because there’s nothing
on the outside of the pump, there’s no way you can tell the pump is
compromised.

Not a safe way to pay

Nancy and Jim Tew no longer use their debit cards to pay at the pump —
and for good reason. They both had their debit card numbers stolen at
one of those gas stations in Puyallup, Wash.

Nancy Tew found out about the theft when her card was rejected at the
grocery store. “To my astonishment, I had no money in the bank,” she
said.

The thieves used her account number at ATMs in Hollywood, Calif., to
steal $600. They got $900 from her husband’s checking account. She
tells me it was “totally bizarre and really scary” to be targeted like
that and not even know it.

The Tews now pay for their gas — with cash or debit card — at the
register. That may sound paranoid, but other victims of this skimming
attack tell me they now do the same thing.

Police in Puyallup and Las Vegas now advise residents not to use their
debit card at a gas pump because there’s no way to be sure it hasn’t
been tampered with.

That’s smart advice and here’s why. Debit cards do not offer the same
fraud protection as credit cards. If crook armed with a skimmer snags
your credit card number and uses it to buy things, you can dispute the
charges with the credit card company. You won’t owe a thing while they
investigate.

If the crook grabs your debit card number, he can go to a cash machine
and pull money out of your checking account. It could take days for
the bank to investigate and put that money back into your account.
During that time checks could bounce or you might not be able to pay
your bills. That’s why the only way I pay at the pump is with a credit
card.

Two held on Orkut Abuse against Sindhu Joy, SFI State President.

The Kerala Police have arrested two persons on the charge of defaming Ms.Sindhu Joy, SFI State President through Orkut, one of the most famous social networking website in India, with the help of Kerala Police Hi-Tech Cell.

The students’ leader, who has been successfully using the friendship network portal to interact with SFI activists and spread the message of the Federation among her other friends, has approached the Cyber Cell of Kerala Police with a written complaint against activities on Orkut that are derogatory to her. In the complaint filed at the Cell, Sindhu Joy specifically mentioned two communities in Orkut that she felt were formed with the intention of tarnishing her image. “One of the communities ‘I hate Sindhu Joy’ has several messages to defame me. I don’t know who is behind this community,” Sindhu Joy told. She first took up the issue with Home Minister Kodiyeri Balakrishnan, who advised her to approach the Cyber Cell.

The case was enquired by the Hi-Tech Cell Team and identified the suspects as Prasobh Kumar (Age 32), a lecturer of the Centre for Management Development at Thycaud, Thiruvananthapuram and Asok Kumar (Age 29), a project staff of the same centre, a Hi-Tech Cell official said. He also said that the suspects had used their office computers to create fake and defamatory communities of Sindhu Joy on Orkut. The case was then transferred to Thiruvananthapuram City Police for investigation.

Cyber Cell find out the creator of the defamatory community ‘I Hate Sindhu Joy’ as ‘A new Thought.!!!’ on 21 Oct 2007 and the second community ‘Sindhu joy time to defend’ was created by a user ‘Proper action’ on 19 Oct 2007. They traced the details of the creators of the two communities using Cyber Forensics software tools and information collected from Google Inc. and Internet Service Providers. The two fake communities were created from the computers of Center of Management Development, Thiruvananthapuram, an official said.

Thiruvananthapuram City Police arrested the accused persons and seized the computers that are used to create the communities and fake profiles from the Centre for Management Development at Thycaud, Thiruvananthapuram. The seized computers are being sent to C-DAC (Center for Development of Advanced Computing, Thiruvananthapuram, for forensic analysis, a City Police official said.



Related Articles: NewIndExpress, ThatisMalayalam

Cyber Crime – Hacking - Software Engineer arrested from Chennai

Cyber Crime – Hacking - Software Engineer arrested from Chennai

One M.S. Ramasamy, a 37 year old Software Engineer from Avadi, had arrested on 27.07.07 by the Chennai Cyber Crime Police on charges of hacking and stealing confidential and proprietary information from the server of a US IT Company. He was a former employee of that IT Company. Police framed charges under Section 66 of the IT Act, 2000 which dealing with Hacking and Section 408 of the IPC which dealing with Criminal Breach of Trust by Clerk or Servant.

In its press release Chennai Police said that Mr. Ramasamy had reportedly hacked into the company’s headquarter computer system when he was working as an Engineer in Caterpillar India Private Limited during January and February this year.

The accused accessed the company’s server located at Peoria in Illinois, US, by using another employee’s User ID and password and downloaded confidential information. A closed circuit camera recorded the activities of the sever room. By analyzing the server log and the visuals from the camera Police tracked the accused. Police arrested the hacker from an IT Company at Hosur, where he was employed. The Police confiscated the hard disk and pen drive containing the files.

Source: Hindu