In his recent white paper, entitled “Fraud Trends in 2010,” Rick Van Luvender, Director of First Data’s InfoSec Incident Response Center, has forever characterized this thriving underground economy as Fraud-as-a-Service, or FaaS.

Here, RRN.Com excerpts an overview of the threat from Van Luvender’s presentation, which may be downloaded in its entirety by clicking here.
“At the center of FaaS are the online fraud forums, where individuals, groups, and organizations active in the trade of fraudulent goods and services gather to collaborate, offer their skills, and buy and sell stolen goods,” Van Luvender writes. “A popular means of trading stolen information, web-based forums post advertisements that are visible to anyone visiting and often only require registration with a user name. In order to attract visitors, many forums even offer tutorials, how-to guides, or even specialized venues for goods from specific countries or regions.”

“In the FaaS model, the forums provide the opportunity for access to specialists who can help design methods for harvesting (or stealing) data such as malware, skimmers, and botnets,” Van Luvender continues. “Because no fraudulent act is finished until there is a cash-out on the stolen data, to help complete the transaction, ‘cashiers’ and ‘money mules’ are available for hire to act as intermediaries in converting information into true currency. These contractors will transfer funds from stolen accounts into legitimate currency for a commission on the amount transferred, or will help validate CVV2 numbers against their corresponding credit card number and expiration dates for nominal fees. Criminals can even request cashiers for specific locations, nationalities, or gender to match the identity of the victim in order to minimize suspicion when withdrawing funds.”

When the program begins its installation, the first screen will ask if you want to “… improve Internet Explorer” I suggest you select “I do not wish to participate right now”.

Now choose the “Install” button.

Next you will have to accept the User License Agreement by clicking on “I accept”.

The next window will ask if you want to “Install Updates” make sure that is selected and select the “Next” button.

After the updates and malicious scan you should be asked to restart your computer. There might be other Microsoft updates running too.

After the reboot, open Internet Explorer to continue.

You should get a Welcome to Internet Explorer 8 window where you need to select “Next”.

If you have other browsers you might be asked if you want to make IE your default browser. Make your choice.

The next window will ask if you want to “Turn on Suggested Sites”. This has causes some people grief so I suggest you select “No, don’t turn on” and then select “Next” to continue.

The next Window labeled “Choose you settings” select “Choose Custom Settings” and then the “Next” button to continue.

The next window is where you get to choose you search settings, select “Show me a web page after setup…” and then select “Next”.

The new page is “Search Provider Updates”, here you want to choose “No, I don’t want to download updates.” and select “Next” once again.

On the Choose you accelerators page select the “Turn off all accelerators that are included with Internet Explorer” radio button, this too has caused some issues for customers. Again, choose the “Next” button to continue.

The page that comes up is the “Turn on Smart Screen Filters” page, once again I suggest that you select the “Turn off SmartScreen Filter” button and then select “Next”.

Compatibility Settings will be asked once again, select the ”No, I don’t want to use updates” button and then the “Finish” button.

IE will open with at least 3 tabs, the far right should be the “Welcome to IE” one while the one just to the left of it (centered in most cases) will be the “Add Search Providers”.

Here is where you can choose your provider from the list, select one such as “Google” and a new window will appear (if you have not already selected that provider in IE 7.

Select the “Make this my Default…” check box and unselect the “Use search suggestions from this provider” and then click the “Add” button.

That’s all there is to it folks.

Until we meet again, have a virus free week!

We can speed up your surfing of some web sites by attempting to stop the animations that play. Now, web developers use different ways to create animations, this is just one way to stop some of them.

Those moving pictures (cartoons) on web sites are called animated GIFs on some web pages. They will slow down your browsing especially if you use a dial-up connection. You can easily turn them off in Internet Explorer.

To stop them, open Internet Explorer (you do not need to connect to the internet).

Choose Tools | Internet Options.

Click on the Advanced tab and browse / scroll down to Multimedia.

Deselect Play Animations or remove the check mark.

While you are at it you might as well turn off Play Videos in Web Pages, if you have Internet Explorer 6 still. (Why would you still have it?)

Click OK to save your changes.

Exit Internet Explorer and start it backup. That is all there is to it.

Of course other browsers have similar options that you can do the same with.

Until we meet again, have a virus free week!

Most Web pages are made up of multiple files, including the HTML file that creates the page and various graphic, sound, and script files that display on the page.

Before Internet Explorer can display a page, these files must be stored on your hard disk. The location to which these files are copied is called the Internet Explorer Cache. You can imagine how much space gets used when you surf thousands of Web pages!
Fortunately, there’s a way of getting some of that lost disk space back. First, open Internet Explorer the way you usually do (usually by clicking on the blue e on your desktop), then from the menu bar select Tools | Internet Options.

Next, you’ll see the Internet Options properties sheet. Select the General tab. There is a button under Temporary Internet files that allows you to delete files, click on it.

This button refers to all of the cached Web pages that are stored on your system. Although clicking this button will clear the cache, you still need to prevent it from filling back up. So, click the Settings button. You can control the maximum amount of hard disk space that the Internet Explorer cache is allowed to use.

If the current number is too high, lower this number to meet your needs. As a rule of thumb I select about 100MB of my hard drive.

You also can use the Move Folder button to relocate the cache to another hard disk or partition with more free space.

Question you want answered? email me! Comment on this or any other article, comment away!

Until we meet again, have a virus free week!