The report says:

July 2008 saw the emergence of rehab spam. Subject lines have included

- Get help today with Drug Rehab Info
- Overcome Alcoholism today
Spammers are constantly trying new tactics to try and coerce recipients into opening a
spam message so that they can obtain personal information from end users. In this particu-
lar example, they are trying to target individuals who are not in good health, in the hopes
that they will act on this spam message and give away their personal details.

Read the full August State of Spam report here.

The first UEPS transaction was performed on Sunday, August 3, 2008, in Baghdad, Iraq, during the official launch of the UEPS smart card technology with the two state banks namely, Rafidain Bank and Rasheed Bank.

The official launch, attended by invitees from Rafidain Bank, Rasheed Bank, the Iraqi Government, War Victim Ministry and Martyrdom Ministry, demonstrated smart card registration, biometric enrolment and issuing of UEPS cards, offline loading of wage payments and government grants to the UEPS cards and dispensing of cash.

The pilot project involving 100,000 beneficiaries is now ready for implementation across selected bank branches and will enable the distribution and payment of government grants to war victims and martyrdom beneficiaries, as well as salary and wage distribution and payment to employees of the two state banks.

Brenda Stewart, Net1 Senior Vice President Sales and Marketing, said, "From the entire team at Net1, we congratulate the Iraqi consortium on this historic achievement and look forward to the successful implementation of the various projects already identified for implementation, as well as the projects currently in business development. Net1 is proud that the development of its core technology, from which it creates end-user products that satisfy the requirements of its customers, can change the way business is conducted leading to the improvement of people's lives. We share the belief of our Iraqi partners that our technology can play a fundamental role in the upliftment of the economy. The success of any technology should be measured, not only by the profits it generates for its inventors, suppliers and users, but also by the difference that it makes to the lives of people," Stewart concluded.

In fact, it’s not just great artists like Mr. Lucas and I starting up old projects, our honourable colleagues wearing the black hats have got the same idea. We have new victims reporting in, rumours abound of an auth system compromise at Citi, the Ombudsman is backlogged with months of disputed withdrawal cases, and some like Alain Job are even going to court.

One original contributor to the phantom case histories has just been hit by a second phantom withdrawal five years on and is chalking up another case in the files. While her new phantom is a bread-and-butter skim incident (a magstripe clone used in the far east), amongst this mass, true phantoms — the real mystery cases — are on the rise too. Two new victims with whom I have been corresponding very kindly offered to fund the hosting for the revamped site.

Let’s consider one of these mysteries. The McGaughey case has been reported in the media in Northern Ireland: dozens of withdrawals taking place over four weeks, totaling almost five thousand pounds, all within a ten mile radius of the McGaughey’s home. Summarised that way it looks like a classic first party fraud (couple short on cash withdraw money, then deny it later). But no-one in the family is short on cash, the McGaugheys look after their card details carefully, and have solid alibis at the time of many of the withdrawals, and the interlocking pattern of real and disputed withdrawals is such that any third party would have a hard time taking and returning the card (whether covertly or in collusion with the McGaugheys). No-one appears to have either the means or the motive.

Unusually the bank has been very cooperative, providing logs from their authorisation system (BASE24), including all of the cryptograms, input data and transaction parameters covering the affected transactions. Everything turns on the Application Transaction Counter (ATC), an on-card counter which increments with every transaction initiated. If an EMV chip can be fully cloned (secret keys and all), then it will have to submit an ATC value when transacting, and if used in parallel with the real card, it won’t be long before the same number pops up twice in the auth system, or large gaps in the sequence appear. The McGaughey’s ATC sequence appears to interlock perfectly: clearly the original card was used?

Of course logs can be misinterpreted (Badger) or even faked, auth systems may not work as expected, and customers may lie and cheat following all sorts of agendas; just around the corner the missing piece of the jigsaw may lie, which reveals the truth behind the case. And there is the totally separate matter of who should suffer the loss in the interim, whilst the truth remains unclear. Liability for disputed withdrawals is the most hotly contested issue of all.

phantomwithdrawals.com can’t do much more for the McGaugheys, but it can bear witness. Documenting the incidence of phantoms and the experiences of customers disputing them adds much needed transparency to the process, and helps researchers and experts seek out the really interesting cases.

Maybe we can lift the lid and discover the truth behind the “phantom menace” — everyone is united in that goal at least — but let’s also hope that Episode 2: Attack of the Clones has not yet started shooting!

Mike.

An attacker who successfully exploits the vulnerability could perform a session fixation attack. This allows the attacker to pre-set the victim’s session ID and to use the fixed session ID for malicious activities.

An attack of this sort, known as “cross-site cooking,” might include tricking a user to log in through a malicious form, exploiting a cross-site scripting vulnerability or meta tag injection flaw, breaking into host in the target server’s domain, and network traffic alteration.

To learn more, read the full article.