BB FANS

NOT content with being skinned alive by outrageous bank charges, the innocent consumer has now also been taking to the cleaners by that purveyor of all known evils – the internet.

According to a survey by Get Safe Online in conjunction with the BBC, 12% of us have suffered online fraud in the last 12 months, at an average loss of £875.

Ebay’s Garreth Griffith (a man with the rather woolly title of ‘head of trust and safety’), whose website has been the target of all sorts of fraud and phishing shenanigans, urges its users to read the website’s security information - “Just as people buying a video recorder dispense with the instruction manual so that mentality manifests itself on the internet.”

Good point. But what's a video recorder? anorak

Just the other day my brother had his eBay account Hijacked !
Someone worked out his password ,changed his email address and tried to sell some dodgy sunglasses.
eBay to their credit suspected someone had accessed the account who shouldn't have and removed the listings and put the original email address back.
But as he had used the same password loads of times the other person was monitoring his email so when we changed the password back they changed it again.

A phone call with eBay later and a different email address that wasn't listed with eBay and lots of password changes on other sites and hopefully everything is ok.

eBay thought the password was broken from an email but knowing that a 10 year old could has found it withing a few minutes I'd say they guessed it from eBay and then found the email address.

Luckily it was spotted fairly quickly and it doesn't look as if anything has been taken. And he now has a more secure password.

eBay now has an improved the security bit when it comes to entering the new password where they show you how safe it is with a series of colours with Green being the safest. You should have both letters and numbers and you could have both upper and lower case plus shifted characters all of which would slow down a would-be attacker.

One thing that I've read regarding the protection scheme that PayPal runs is that if you have a product that is faulty or isn't what it was advertised as you have to sent it to PayPal at your cost before you have any chance of a refund,unless the seller backs down. Plus I believe there is also costs involved in a fee so if it's a low value item it just isn't worth doing anything about a dodgy seller to recover the costs. With the scam with the so called 4GB MP3 players people on another board was moaning about the trouble they were having trying to get things done about those selling them and the costs involved. In the UK the units were selling for around £20 but in some countries they went for a lot more.

Ideally you should have different passwords for different sites just so that if someone does discover one they don't have access to all your accounts !

Sorry to hear about your brother's bad luck, Larry.

One in ten Brits is victim of online fraud

www.theregister.co.uk

Stolen Bulldog Broadband Customer Details


cabinet1.jpgWE might as well forget about shredding our bank accounts and upgrading our internet security software. What’s the point?

It seems that an infinite level of incompetence on the part of numerous companies coupled with a growing illegal trade in personal information are rendering any security measures pointless.

According to the Guardian, around 100,000 customers of broadband provider Bulldog are the latest victims to have their private details stolen.

Cable & Wireless, the global giant who sold Bulldog’s customer base to Pipex last year, admitted that customer contact details had been “illegally obtained” by a shady “unnamed third party” back in 2005.

Managing director of Bulldog Internet, James Brown, was definitely not, er, feeling good. Said he: “It has become apparent that at some point in December 2005 Cable & Wireless had some of their customer contact details illegally obtained by a third party. This resulted in a small number of their customers receiving unsolicited calls.”

You might as well just paint your bank details on the side of you houses in big red lettering.

That’s if you can afford a house these days.

anorak

Peers want crackdown on web's 'wild west'


Bobbie Johnson, technology correspondent

The government and police must act to improve online security and stop the internet becoming a "playground of criminals", a parliamentary committee warns today. A report from the House of Lords science and technology select committee accuses both business and government of creating an image of the net as a "wild west", with millions of internet users unnecessarily exposed to crime.

"The internet is now increasingly the playground of criminals," the report says. "Where a decade ago the public perception of the e-criminal was of a lonely hacker searching for attention, today's bad guys belong to organised crime groups, are highly skilful, specialised and focused on profit. They want to stay invisible, and so far they have largely succeeded."

The result of a six-month committee investigation into online security suggests radical solutions including a new internet crime fighting police unit and an independent web regulator.

The report attacks the received web wisdom that individual web surfers should be responsible for their security. "You can't just rely on individuals to take responsibility for their own security. They will always be outfoxed by the bad guys," said committee chairman Lord Broers, a veteran of the technology industry and former vice-chancellor of Cambridge University. "We feel many of the organisations profiting from internet services now need to take their share of the responsibility."

The document accuses politicians of an outdated attitude to internet safety and an inability to prevent the spread of fear about internet crime. A recent survey showed that people were more fearful of having their online security compromised than they were of being mugged.

Proposals include laboratories for investigating internet crime, in place of the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit, disbanded during the creation of the Serious and Organised Crime Agency in 2006.

A new police e-crime unit would also be supported by a website where members of the public could report cyber-crooks.

Metropolitan police commander Sue Wilkinson told the committee that forces did not have enough resources or expertise to investigate all reports of internet-based crime. "The scale is such that the police service would fall over if it tried to investigate every case," she said. "I would hate any member of the public to feel that they can't report a crime, but people need to understand that each individual e-crime can't be investigated."

Last month business leaders called for better support from the government and police as they struggle to cope with the increase in online crime. But the peers said banks and software companies had not given enough priority to the security of their customers.

"At the heart of this is establishing public trust in the internet and safeguarding citizens," said Nick Kalisperas, director of the IT trade group Intellect. "We're very supportive of the report and its recommendations. But one area which is cause for serious concern is the idea of placing liability for security breaches on technology companies. We don't buy a car and then expect the manufacturer to pay up when it gets broken into."

Last year identity theft and online fraud cost British consumers at least £414m, and the information commissioner has called the state of data protection "frankly horrifying".
guardian