Tracking the Password Thieves

wiredog writes "From The Washington Post, yet another story about phishers, keyloggers, and viruses. The story is nothing new, but the author has a blog where he describes how he gathered the information that went into the story. Information including the locations of the victims, and the ISPs likeliest to be hit. Some of the victims included "an engineer for the Architect of the Capitol" and a man who "works in computer security for IBM." One victim "was fresh out of college, where he'd just earned a degree in information security. (He was actively looking for a job in the field; I suggested he may want to go back to the classroom.)" A compromised machine was also found in "the new accounts department at Bank of America" (Score!)"

Comments

ISPs most likely to be hit

[DarkLegacy]

That chart simply looks like a demographic on the amount of users currently using those ISPs. As with spyware, it makes sense of course that the biggest population will be hit the hardest. That's effectively why alternative operating systems are impenetrable to virii and other nasty things. They aren't looked at by the majority of the 'bad people' out there. :P

Re:A list could be good

[geoffspear]

I doubt it's the ISPs' fault; looking at the list it seems plausible that the "most likely" to be hit are simply the largest ISPs, so you'd expect the largest numbers of affected users to be using those ISPs.

Besides, if 2 supposed "network security" people got hit, do the ISPs really have any hope whatsoever in trying to educate their users to avoid phishing?

Re:A list could be good

[Balsamic Moon]

"Likeliest to be hit" is a mislable. It should read "ISP's inept users" who allow themselves to become vunerable due to ignorance or carelessness.

This isn't some war between ISPs. The graph shows clearly what ISP had the most victims due to this virii. But even that isnt conclusive of anything because of the quantity of overall customers isnt revealed. Yeh sure we can say Comcast has the most, but they surely have more customers overall than say, oh Qwest.

Re:It's the Russian mafia! Ahhh!

[geoffspear]

The problem is that you apparently need to make the requirements to get a "computer license" more stringent than those required to get a job in network security at IBM or a degree in information security. Good luck legislating that when you're going to have to take away the computers of everyone in Congress and all of their staff.