LinkedIn Scamming Customers?

Anyone who is active in the professional world loves LinkedIn. (In my opinion) it is an absolutely flawless way to network, get your name out there, and build up on online resume that is able to be referenced on websites,blogs, or emails. It allows companies seeking employees an easy venue to find qualified personnel, helps skilled labor to find a company looking for someone just like them, and rekindles old flames left to die. Okay, so maybe isn't the hotbed of romantic activity on the internet, but its great for business. Especially LinkedIn's bottom line.


"How can LinkedIn benefit from networking?"

When you sign up for LinkedIn, you are asked to complete a resume of sorts. This initial information includes your name, date of birth, field of business,location and interests. Then you of course have the option of adding where you have worked, gone to school, and clubs/associations you are a part of. After all these personally identifiable things, you are then given the option of Joining Linkedin "Groups". These are generally trade groups or groups that allow a person to further network their profile. In short, LinkedIn has developed a complete advertiser's dream scenario. A company can buy your profile information from LinkedIn, and are provided with all of your information, along with means of contact for you. In general, LinkedIn has a full demographical breakdown of you and anyone you "Invite" to LinkedIn. And whereas the majority of LinkedIn users are over 40 and have incomes of over $100,000 dollars- they are the ideal targets of marketers, both legitimate and not. Recently LinkedIn decided to advertise merchandise to its users, but in a selective manner. For example, if Mercedes decided to advertise its new model, it would go to LinkedIn and they would choose from the member database the ones that fitted the marketing campaign. Then, LinkedIn decided to make a little more money by offering Premium Business and Premium Business Plus. With a regular membership you couldn't just send someone an e-mail, you had to be introduced first; with the new types of membership, this was no longer an issue. HR companies saw a great opportunity in this and for good reason. All they had to do was pay and they had access to all sorts of potential job candidates.

Their new Enterprise Corporate Solution gives access to all 23 million users of LinkedIn.

New Home Router Hacking Program

A newly discovered Trojan in the wild hacks into home wireless routers and changes their DNS settings to point to the attacker’s rogue DNS server. The malware is a new variant of the DNSChanger Trojan that has been circulating around the Internet, according to researchers at Secure Computing who have been studying it.

Home routers make easy prey because many users don’t lock them down, and even use their default passwords for authentication. There’s been plenty of research in this space over the past year, everything from drive-by hacks to botnet infections to DNS rebinding. (See Attackers Use New 'Call-Home' Method to Infiltrate Home Networks and RSA Session Features Live Linksys Router Hack and The Hack Your Home Router Challenge.)

Sven Krasser, director of data mining research for Secure Computing, says the new DNSChanger Trojan attack also indirectly infects any machine that connects to the router. “This is the first time we’ve seen on [a] wide basis that the computing resources of the wireless router are part of the attack,” he says. “It also [affects] machines that are not directly exploited -- ones that are connecting to the router.”

The Trojan executes brute-force attacks on the Web interface of a router that only uses basic authentication -- and it’s mostly going after D-Link and Linksys routers so far, according to Krasser.

Secure Computing says the attackers behind the malware are the infamous Zlob malware authors.

Krasser says the attackers can send a victim to any Website, and most times return the correct site back to the user to evade detection. Other times they redirect a user to their own spoofed pages, he says. He says phishing is a likely goal of the attackers.

He says it’s possible that attackers could kick the attack up a notch and add put their malcode onto the routers, such as zombie code. Secure Computing researchers have posted some screen shots and an analysis of the Trojan in their blog.

Never use default passwords in home routers, Krasser says, and keep it updated.