Mafia Victim Not a Rat?

Friends of mine: Colombo Crime Family, Greg "The Grim Reaper" Scarpa

Accused FBI mob mole Lindley DeVecchio, charged with sealing the fate of a Brooklyn teen by tipping off a Colombo crime pal that the boy was about to squeal, had been completely wrong about the 17-year-old's intentions.

Filings in a related case make clear that murder victim Patrick Porco was no rat. "Porco flatly refused to answer the investigators' questions," the court papers reveal.

DeVecchio, a star FBI agent who helped make major cases against the mob in the '80s and early '90s, now stands accused of four counts of second-degree murder for an all-too-cozy relationship with Colombo killer Gregory "The Grim Reaper" Scarpa. Brooklyn prosecutors allege that he thanked Scarpa for the info he got by sending back tips that helped the mobster avoid arrest and whack rivals. DeVecchio has denied any wrongdoing.

In the Porco case, DeVecchio is accused of acting to safeguard Scarpa's son, Joey, from a murder rap.

In the spring of 1990, cops and prosecutors were eager to talk to Porco about a fatal drive-by shooting the previous Halloween. The victim was Dominick Masseria, 17, who was believed to have tossed eggs at the wrong bunch of kids. Porco and Joey Scarpa were in the white limo involved in the shooting.

Just after speaking on the phone with DeVecchio, Gregory Scarpa told his girlfriend that Joey was going to have to kill Porco, prosecutors say. But last week's filings make clear that prosecutors' efforts to find out what Porco knew were going nowhere.

On May 5, 1990, Porco and his sister met with prosecutors and Detective Alphonse Lombardo. "Neither one was willing to talk," the papers reveal. "Inspector Lombardo confronted Patrick Porco with the fact that he was likely to be killed because he was the only witness who could implicate Joey Scarpa.

"Porco started crying, but he steadfastly refused to cooperate."

But even the appearance of cooperation was enough. Porco was found shot dead - once in the mouth, signifying rat - on Memorial Day, 1990.

In 2005, the Brooklyn DA reopened the Masseria case, identifying the shooter as Craig Sobel, 39. The papers revealing Porco's noncooperation were filed in connection with the Sobel case.

Thanks to Alex Ginsberg

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Blood vs. Blood in Operation Family Secrets

The mob hit men were under the gun -- literally -- as they exited the brown Ford LTD and approached their target in front of the His 'N Mine Lounge in Cicero.

One of them, Nick Calabrese, felt he had a choice. Either kill the intended victim, Richard Ortiz, an alleged dope peddler who had crossed the mob -- or be killed himself.

Nearby, in the car he just left, sat his brother, Frank Calabrese Sr., with a gun aimed out the window. Frank Calabrese Sr. was providing cover for the hit men. He could just as easily mow them down if they froze on the job.

Nick Calabrese had no doubt his brother would do it if he didn't complete the job, according to federal court testimony. It was not a new feeling for Nick Calabrese. He and other family members often worried that Frank Calabrese Sr. was going to kill them. In fact, Frank Calabrese Sr. instilled fear and terror into his family every day.

Interviews with friends and acquaintances of the family and law enforcement sources along with a review of court records provide fresh details on life in the Calabrese family. The stereotype of the mobster -- whether it's Tony Soprano or Michael Corleone -- is that while he does business brutally, he treats his family with honor and respect. Calabrese Sr. shattered that perception, according to interviews and court records.

In the 1983 murder of Ortiz, the victim had been stalked for months. Nick Calabrese had called off one hit attempt because he believed it was too risky. But rather than tell his brother the truth and incur his wrath, he told him another hit man, James DiForti, froze during the job.

Frank Calabrese Sr. told Nick Calabrese he should have killed Ortiz anyway. And then Frank Calabrese Sr. told his brother he should have killed DiForti, as well.

Such brutality and ruthlessness may help explain why Calabrese Sr. has not one but two family members cooperating against him in a case that has been called the most important mob prosecution in Chicago history. The investigation is called Family Secrets, and it indeed will reveal some of the deepest family secrets of the Chicago Outfit. But underlying the case are other family secrets -- those of the Calabrese family -- that many never saw but that still haunt the family.

At the trial starting in May, Nick Calabrese will testify about the mob killings he and his brother went out on together, such as the Ortiz killing. In that case, Nick Calabrese and DiForti went through with the hit at the His 'N Mine.

Calabrese Sr.'s son Frank Jr. was less involved in the mob life and has gone clean. He will tell jurors about the conversations he had with his father as they walked the yard while in prison together on another case in 1999 -- conversations he secretly recorded at great risk to himself to ensure his father never saw freedom again.

In those conversations, Calabrese Sr. may have believed he was advising his son on mob life and planting the seeds with him to continue the Calabrese legacy in the Outfit. Instead, he may have been sowing his own destruction.

Frank Calabrese Sr. is even recorded once on tape telling his son he would send "his blessing" if other top mobsters determined his brother Nick was cooperating and had him killed.

How Frank Calabrese Sr. treated his children became a sore point between Calabrese Sr. and his brother Nick. The tension reached a high point during the first federal case against them in 1995, according to law enforcement sources.

While Frank Sr. and Nick had deep involvement in their street crew, Frank Jr., had much less involvement, while his son Kurt's role was virtually nonexistent.

Nick Calabrese felt his brother could have better looked out for his sons in the case and worked to reduce any chance of prison time for the two young men. But in the end, both went to prison. While Calabrese Sr. was sentenced to nearly 10 years in prison, son Frank got 57 months and Kurt got 2 years.

When Frank Calabrese Jr. and his younger brother, Kurt, were growing up in Elmwood Park, their childhood, from the outside, seemed normal and all-American, according to people who know them. They lived in a tight-knit, Italian-American neighborhood, going to school at John Mills Elementary and to what was then Holy Cross High School.

In the community, Frank Calabrese Sr. worked to portray himself as a great father, one who was always friendly with the neighborhood kids. Inside the home, though, was a radically different story.

Calabrese Sr. would at times erupt in rages, even over the smallest matters, and scream like a maniac at his two sons, according to sources who know the family. Following the humiliation would come the beatings, with Kurt Calabrese often taking the worst of it. It was a reign of terror that left both sons dreading the time their father came home every day. The abuse continued into adulthood.

When Kurt Calabrese, for instance, got married in the early 1990s, the matter was not a cause of celebration for his father. Kurt was seeing the granddaughter of Angelo "The Hook" LaPietra, a brutal mobster who was Calabrese Sr.'s mentor in the mob.

Neither Calabrese Sr. nor LaPietra wanted the two young people to see each other, but the two fell in love and secretly got married.

On his wedding night, Kurt Calabrese broke the news to his father while they were sitting down at a restaurant in the west suburbs. Calabrese Sr. was stunned that his son would disobey him and punched him in the face. Fearing for his life, Kurt Calabrese hightailed it out of the restaurant and drove off. The two engaged in a high-speed chase, with Kurt Calabrese eventually eluding him.

Chicago political operative Frank Coconate, a friend of Frank Jr.'s, pointed to that confrontation as an example of the price the family paid for Calabrese Sr.'s decisions. "That's what the Outfit does, it makes you choose between them and your family," Coconate said. Frank Calabrese Sr. "chose the mob and threw his family in the gutter."

Despite often taking the worst of the abuse, Kurt Calabrese is not cooperating in the case, law enforcement sources said.

Calabrese Sr.'s attorney Joseph Lopez denied that his client ever abused his children and said the elder Calabrese loves both sons dearly. But Lopez also went on the attack on Frank Calabrese Jr., calling him a con artist who "could sell air conditioners to Eskimos."

Calabrese Jr., who is believed to be living out of state, put his life on the line by secretly recording his father, according to court testimony and law enforcement sources. FBI agents did not have the ability to listen in on the conversations as they happened, and if his father attacked him, agents -- whose presence at the prison was a secret -- were not close enough to protect him, law enforcement sources have said. Calabrese Jr.'s key reason for cooperating with the government was to keep his father locked up for good, sources said.

People who associated with Calabrese Sr. say no one was safe from his wrath. Even having breakfast at a restaurant with Calabrese Sr. could turn into a free-for-all. Calabrese Sr. would be very particular about his order. If the waitress should make an error, the mobster would erupt in a fury, spewing obscenities.

Calabrese Sr.'s demanding nature has not mellowed with age.

Well-known Chicago private investigator Ernie Rizzo learned that firsthand when Calabrese Sr. hired him last year to help him prepare for trial, according to a source familiar with Rizzo's account. Calabrese Sr.'s trial strategy is to try to dig up dirt on his son Frank Jr. in an attempt to undermine his testimony.

It's unclear how attacking the son, though, will counter Calabrese's Sr. own words on hours of secretly recorded conversations in which he discusses mob hits. His attorney has suggested in court that Calabrese Sr. was merely bragging about things he actually never took part in.

Calabrese Sr. wanted Rizzo's office number. And his cell phone numbers. Plus his home phone number. And the phone numbers of any bars where he hung out.

Calabrese Sr. also was frustrated with his attorney, Lopez, because Lopez allegedly wasn't taking his calls -- or calls from his representatives -- as often as Calabrese Sr. wanted.

So Calabrese Sr. wanted to find out if Rizzo had better luck with Lopez. Calabrese Sr. wanted Rizzo to keep a log on how many phone calls it took before the attorney answered Rizzo's calls. That way, Calabrese Sr. would have something to badger Lopez about.

Calabrese Sr. "orders people around like a hit man," Rizzo would say, according to the source.

The thing that disturbed Rizzo most was that Calabrese Sr. would try to get to meet him alone, away from his lawyer, at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in the Loop, where Calabrese Sr. is being held. The one-on-one meeting never took place.

Thanks to Steve Warmbir

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Are Murder Rates the Best Guage of Violent Crime?

As end-of-year crime statistics are tallied, newspapers in recent weeks have been running headlines comparing their local crime rates with other cities and with prior years.

"L.A. County homicides decrease by 6%," the Los Angeles Times reported. The Dallas Morning News headlined its report, "Murders fall, rapes rise in '06," while noting that Dallas was likely to retain its reputation as the most crime-ridden city with a population of one million or more. According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, violent crime "rose sharply" in 2006, but the rate of increase declined during the year. But while murder stats make for good headlines, they may not be the best gauge of violent crime, or a city's safety. I took a look at two compelling theories from criminologists that call into question the way the numbers are used.

The first theory, proposed by the federally funded Improving Crime Data project run by researchers from Georgia State University and the University of Missouri-St. Louis, holds that a city's stats should be adjusted for underlying demographic characteristics. The idea is to figure out if a city's murder rate is higher or lower than you would expect it to be. To do that, researchers examined factors that appeared to contribute to a higher murder rate, including the number of people living in poverty, the city's racial makeup and the divorce rate. (They also identified factors that didn't appear to have an impact on murder rates, including population density. More detail on the calculations can be found here.)

The thinking is that those underlying factors can't be controlled, so when you take them out, you can more clearly evaluate how well police and city policies are preventing homicides. "It helps you direct the police forces in a way that is data-driven rather than either political or serendipitous," said Robert Friedmann, professor of criminal justice at Georgia State University and principal investigator on the ICD project. He added, "When you're ranking a city on raw rates, it doesn't take into account the nature of the city."

Think of a comparison between two hospitals' death rates (a topic I wrote about last year). If Hospital A has a higher proportion of patients suffering from life-threatening diseases, it wouldn't be fair to compare its death rate to Hospital B, which tends to treat patients with milder complaints. Prof. Friedmann's team believes that certain cities (Atlanta, Detroit) have higher underlying risk of murder than others (Denver, San Francisco).

The group relies on stats from the federal government, so its most recent ranking is for 2004. According to that ranking, San Francisco was No. 1 among 67 cities in adjusted homicide rates, despite ranking 30th in the raw rates. Atlanta, conversely, fell to No. 46 from No. 7 after the adjustments. And Detroit dropped to No. 37 on the list from No. 3 -- suggesting that the city's demographic profile helps explain what the Detroit News earlier this month called an "abysmal" crime picture for the city.

The project's underlying premise, that a city's economic and demographic makeup forecasts crime rates, has controversial implications. I asked Prof. Friedmann whether his model is suggesting that African Americans are more likely to commit murder than whites living in similar circumstances. "On the face of it, it looks troubling," he replied. But he offered another explanation: Blacks are disproportionately the victims of homicide. Also, his model shows only that a city's black population correlates with homicide rates, not that it causes them -- some other underlying factor may be influencing the numbers. "It seems to me that if you take the racial attributes out of a politically correct discussion and just look at the facts, it is something that makes sense to analyze," Prof. Friedmann said.

Meanwhile, Anthony Harris, professor emeritus of criminal justice at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, is behind another theory getting a lot of attention. He has for several years argued that murder numbers are not a good measuring stick because they can be heavily influenced by the emergency medical care someone receives. The difference between life and death on the operating table can determine whether a murder rate rises.

Prof. Harris was the lead author of a study in 2002 examining the decline in the murder rate between 1960 and 1999. Prof. Harris focused on the role improved medical care had on "lethality," which is the proportion of violent crimes that result in death. Even though the number of potentially deadly attacks surged in that time period, and the proportion of attacks involving guns also rose, lethality actually decreased by 70% -- to under 2% from nearly 6%. He concluded that improved medical-response times and trauma surgery were responsible for turning many would-be murders into assaults.

To demonstrate the effect of medical care, the researchers compared counties nationwide by various medical criteria, and found, for instance, that counties with at least one hospital were associated with 24% lower lethality than those without a hospital. Prof. Harris also found other medical factors that contributed to a drop in lethality of violent crimes, including the addition of physicians to a county's population and the presence of a facility for performing open-heart surgery.

The Harris study was, by necessity, indirect: The researchers lacked the data to track individual cases and determine whether the same injury was more likely to cause death in 1960 than in 1999. Instead, they tracked broad trends in crime and health care.

Prof. Harris told me that looking at all violent crime, rather than homicide, would better serve lawmakers and police. "If people were looking at aggravated assault and the use of guns in producing serious injury, I think the debate would be totally different," he says. "The big social indicator is injury by gun, and its long-term medical effects."

Derral Cheatwood, professor of sociology at the University of Texas at San Antonio, who has studied the relationship of medical resources to homicide rates in Maryland and Pennsylvania, told me that one of the biggest changes is the approach to treatment at the scene of a crime. "It has shifted from the 1960s, where you put someone in an ambulance, rush them to the hospital and treat them there, to an emergency medical vehicle, where you start to treat them right away and stabilize them," he said. (Bill Doerner, professor of criminology and criminal justice at Florida State University, offered up an interesting anecdote: As recently as 50 years ago, ambulances in Leon County, Fla., were run out of funeral parlors, presenting something of a conflict of interest.)

Lethality has actually edged up since Prof. Harris completed his study. One possible reason for the increase, he said: Several large cities, including Los Angeles and Las Vegas, have closed trauma centers, which can be particularly expensive to operate. "Homicide rates are where trauma centers really have an impact," Connie Potter, executive director of the National Foundation for Trauma Care, told me. A May 2004 report from her group declared a "crisis" in U.S. trauma centers, with 30 closed since 2001.

Thanks to The Numbers Guy, Carl Bialik

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Author Comments on Thief!

Friends of ours: Lucky Luciano, Carlo Gambino, John Gotti
Friends of mine: William "Slick" Hanner

It's strange that our fascination with the mob centers so on top bananas like Lucky Luciano, Carlo Gambino and John Gotti when, as any crime beat reporter will tell you, the most incredible stories always involve madcap misfires by the lowliest flunkies, the truly clueless nostra.

Fort Myers author Cherie Rohn ran into just such a lovable screwball more than a decade ago in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when, after losing her job as a TV station manager, she enrolled in casino dealer's school. One of her instructors was a well-traveled man of action named William "Slick" Hanner. "He was walking around with his notebook of 20 hand-scrawled pages in his third-grade-educated hand of his life story, looking for somebody to write it," Rohn recalls. "No money, of course, but I looked at it and it was like an electric shock went through my body. Something about this guy grabbed me and I vowed to write his story."

A decade in the writing, "Thief: The Gutsy, True Story of an Ex-Con Artist" is the laugh-out-loud misadventures of a savvy Chicago street kid who managed to partake in the profitable mob trifecta of booze, gambling and prostitution without ever actually becoming a made guy.

Like some street-smart version of Forrest Gump, Slick went from rags to riches while drifting through America's hottest post-war entertainment scenes. Whether he was fleecing poker players aboard his yacht, the Knot Guilty, in Miami Beach, driving a limo for Nevada's infamous Chicken Ranch, serving as Jerry Lewis' bodyguard or managing the poker room at the Landmark casino in Las Vegas, Slick was where the action was for the last half of the 20th century. "He was an interesting kind of a screw-up adrenaline junkie con artist who goes through life like a speeding freight train about to derail at any minute," Rohn says of her colorful collaborator.

The project was no mere samba down memory lane. Hanner's third-grade education was one obstacle, but Rohn had her challenges as well. "Aside from a couple lurid love letters, I hadn't written anything," she says. "So I had three tasks: I had to learn to write, I had to learn to write as a guy, and I had to learn to write as a guy who hung with the mob."

Rohn does a wonderful job at all three, telling Slick's first-person tale with all the swagger and latter-day slang of a high-rolling con artist of the day. "We filled it out very slowly," she says. "I actually had to put words into his mouth."

She also found that time was of the essence if she hoped to interview Slick's running mates. "Through the nine agonizing years of writing this story, a lot of people died, mostly from unnatural causes," he quips.

At 74, Slick is still doing what he does best, playing poker and consulting with Las Vegas casinos on how to thwart card sharks.

Does the guy who knows where the bodies are buried fear that some associates may take offense at his candid biography? What are you, nuts?

"We had a few death threats," Rohn admits. "I'm not going to tell you where they came from but they were real. Slick isn't one to worry. His attitude is, 'Hey, if that happens, we can sell a few more books!'"

Thanks to Jay McDonald

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Mafia 2.0 - Is the Mob Married to Your Computer?

Organized crime has had its fingers in criminal activity on the internet for some time, but until about two years ago most of its activity was limited to obvious scams, pornography and gambling. But in the past two years the rapid growth in organized crime in Eastern Europe and a huge increase in sophistication has jumped organized crime on the internet from an irritation to a serious problem.

How is this happening? The basic reason is that almost half all computer users connected to the internet have no or ineffective security protecting themselves and their systems while they web browse or even when using email. That doesn't even take into account new threats spreading into instant messaging, VoIP and even cell phones.

Estimates of losses from internet and other computer-related fraud in the UK alone are over $4 billion annually. And the losses come in all forms – from small sums scammed out of people via email up to blackmail, extortion and outright theft of very large sums from large corporations. Some of these attacks come with collusion or inadvertant access inside organizations to secure systems, but most come from some form of trickery that exploits naïve and insecure practices in all kinds of ways. And because of the embarassment, many of these frauds go unreported.

First up, WHAT criminals are up to - the top types of internet, telephony, email and credit card scams.

Top Scams

1: Credit card and telephony billing fraud. Example: The Gambino family telephony scam – a couple of telephony company executives organized a billing fraud for credit card and telephony services and a related internet pornography ring on behalf of the Gambino family – that netted over $500 million over a five year period.

2: Nigerian (and Eastern European and Indonesian and...) scams – if you never received a Nigerian scam email you have probably never received email at all – that's how much of it there is – now also known as a 419 scam after the Nigerian anti-fraud law code.

3: Phishing – typically an email supposedly from a bank or credit card company or anyone that has an online financial account that tries to tempt you to log into a site that LOOKS like the real site but is really just a way to watch and capture your account information. These have gotten much more sophisticated and just this past week a kit was made available online to help criminals automatically build sites that transparently pass the data on to the real site and that report that they are the real site – making it even harder to detect the fraud. More recently VoIP and IP Phishing scams have become more prevalent.

4: Zombies – these can be a really subtle scam – you may never even know that you were involved. In this scam your PC is taken over subtly to help run almost every other form of scam. A piece of code gets run on your computer – and it sets itself up as one of a big network of computers (aka a botnet) that hackers have taken over. Once it gets activated, the zombie computer gets used to deliver spam or to infect other computers or to install keyloggers or other malware or even distributed denial of service attacks – then at some later date it just gets turned off again until another time.

5: Extortion – this is one of the big time mob moneyspinners. They infect computers with zombies – often paying unscrupulous hackers something like 20 cents per infected PC – until they have many thousands of infected computers – and then they block access to a major site by having all those zombie PCs access it simultaneously. Depending on circumstances they deliver an extortion demand before or after the attack. This technique has been used successfully against offshore gambling sites and with mixed success against all kinds of other sites. Demands are typically kept in the $50,000 range to make it easy for companies to pay rather than lose business.

6: Wifi Spying and Packet Sniffing – sure it's fun to kick back and surf the web at Starbucks or the local library. But as David Pogue of the New York Times has illustrated, it is incredibly easy for any hacker to watch everything you do and to also install software onto your laptop without you knowing. And packet sniffing techniques can be combined with devices that read data right off a wire to rebuild network traffic and capture data on the fly.

7: Buddying Up – cyber criminals are also making friends online – on MySpace, Facebook and even business-oriented LinkedIn – it is easy to fake an attractive identity and then suck in new online friends and harvest personal information – many social network posters are willing to give up information that reveals enough to aid in identity theft.

8: Insider Trading – organized crime is starting to hire and train employees to get inside target companies and then steal information and access codes. There is also evidence that some hackers are getting sponsored through college courses to improve their knowledge of IT and security systems purely in order to make them more effective at creating and running attacks.

9: Event Piggybacks – whether it is the World Cup, the Superbowl or a hot celebrity scandal, current events are now part of the social engineering attacks used by malicious hackers. An example is online games or downloadable screensavers associated with an event – prior to the 2006 World Cup, German hackers created downloadable screensavers for many of the teams that enticed fans to download them. Along with the screensaver came a pile of trojan malware.


10: Dumpster Diving – not really a scam – just taking advantage of people disposing of (or losing) storage devices without taking security precautions. Take your pick of the scare stories – either the US military USB drive with highly confidential data that was for sale at an Afghani bazaar or the German police computer hard drive that was full of criminal data that was sold on eBay.

11: Invisible Links – the latest trick – borrowing techniques from the latest web practices – is to run a piece of javascript code when the user simply hovers over a link – that code looks for holes in browser security and downloads a trojan like a keylogger to your PC – all without you even knowing. Plus lots of other Ajax and javascript nastiness is possible.

12: Feed spam – Feed spam is basically a way of feeding real sites that use aggregated RSS feeds with bogus information and malware links.

13: Up And Coming – video and multimedia trojans – the next big target is going to be online media – streaming audio, streaming video, flash movies, animations and games and more. It is quite feasible that someone will find a way to have a YouTube link trigger a method of loading malware onto your computer. How well do you really know that person sending you the latest awesome online video?



Now lets look at WHY hackers are exploiting technology and human nature to get access to your PC.

Billions Of Dollars

Here's the bottom line – money and lots and lots of it. Industry estimates for the US are that at minimum several billion dollars were made in the US in computer and internet fraud last year. Some estimates go as high as over $20 billion. So how do they make that kind of money?

1: Identity theft – most people know about this by now – get access to enough data about someone and you can pretend to be them to get money or false documents. The simplest purpose is to get enough information to access credit cards and use them to get money. But it can go as far as usurping and destroying a whole life by running major criminal enterprises under an assumed identity and then walking away and leaving the real person to be held accountable. This is now a serious problem and probably the number one individual concern in online crime. Any one crime may not be all that big, but multiply it by millions and the potential damage is huge.

2: Data theft – stealing valuable information and reselling it – this is pretty rare and never publicized – businesses are too embarrassed to reveal that their intellectual property has been stolen – but this modern equivalent of industrial espionage is believed to be big business.

3: Extortion and blackmail – amazingly enough this now happens on a personal level as well as being directed at companies. On the personal level, imagine turning on your computer to see a blank screen with one message – 'click here to read about how to get access to this computer' only to be told how to pay money to an offshore account to get an unlock code to get into your own computer! All it takes to activate this is something as simple as technique #11 above. On the corporate side is where the big mafia money and attention. It has gotten to the stage where offshore gambling websites now expect extortion demands around big business days for them like Superbowl Sunday. The demand is simple – pay us $1 million or we will take your site down for the Superbowl using a distributed denial of service attack. The threat is to activate a botnet of hundreds of thousands of PCs to bombard the site with spurious access and download requests, effectively blocking real visitors from getting to the site. And organized crime is now known to be prepared to pay hackers to install these bots on computers worldwide – as much as 20 cents per installation. This may seem like a joke but it is estimated that as many as 5 million PCs are online at any moment that are infected with a malware bot of some kind.

4: Investment and drug scams – the most recent wave of spam is so-called image spam – where the spam text is actually a picture. This is purely to avoid spam detectors and the goal is still the same – one version is to get people to invest in penny stocks to drive the price up so the spammer scammers can sell high after buying low – leaving the victims to pay the price after the stock drops back down again to below the price they paid. The other is to buy pharmaceuticals for cheap on the internet – usually Viagra or a derivative. The reason the drugs are so cheap – they are basically talcum powder if they even exist – but by the time you find that out the 'merchant' is long gone.

There are many, many more but they are essentially all variations on these basic themes.



In order to make sure you are safe your best bet is to take the time to understand the HOW – how your information gets stolen, how your computer gets hijacked.

Exploiting Gaps

There are two parts to this – one is general life activity. For example, if you give your credit card to someone in a store or a restaurant and it gets taken away to somewhere you can't see it, then you have already opened yourself up to credit card fraud. If you sign up for an in store membership at the same time, you just opened yourself up to big time identity theft. Obviously, 99% of the time nothing is going to happen, but that does not mean it never will. Your objective should be to minimise your risk in a sensible way.

The other part is technological – some technologies are more of a target than others. For example, if you run a Windows system and use Internet Explorer as your browser you are automatically at higher risk than a Linux user running Opera or Firefox. While many people would tell you that is because Microsoft's software is full of flaws and buggy to boot and you are just asking for trouble by using it, that is only part of the reason. The other part is just a numbers game – over two thirds of all internet users browse using the combination of Windows and Internet Explorer – that makes a tempting target for the criminal. And if Linux and the Mac get more market share, they too will be targeted for these attacks. Complex software has bugs and sometimes these bugs show up as holes and vulnerabilities. There are Mac and Linux specific viruses and trojans out there – just not many of them – yet.

So how does this all happen? Basically someone somewhere finds a bug in a piece of software that allows an external piece of software to slip inside and gain control of some aspect of your computer or its software. These flaws can be in almost anything. There is even a current attack that uses a flaw in an older version of Symantec's enterprise anti-spyware software – a particular version of malware was written to exploit this flaw and take over computers it attacked and turn them into remotely controllable 'bots'.



HOW to know you've been targeted.

Danger Will Robinson

You want to know that you've been targeted by the mob as soon as possible – well before you turn on your computer to see a ransom demand and a password prompt – pay up or watch your hard drive get trashed. The problem is that many of these attacks aren't even aimed at you – all they want from you is as much processing time and bandwidth as possible over a certain period of time. You may not even know you've been targeted and infected. The botnet attack could run without you ever knowing. Of course, since the hackers have opened a free pathway into your computer, they are going to go back and take advantage of it in any way they can.

Here are a few of the basic signs that you might have a problem. In every case you should move to address the problem immediately.

1: Way too many pop-ups. It is practically impossible to eliminate pop-ups altogether if you ever browse the web. But they should be manageable. If you can hardly even use your computer because of the frequency of pop-ups then it is already too late – you've been infected.

2: Your computer slows down and the hard drive runs all the time – and this happens all the time. If you get worried, shut down your programs one at a time in case there is a big data transfer or backup or copy or virus scan running that is responsible. Then restart. If the problem comes back within a few minutes and you can't tell why, then you could be infected.

3: A HUGE increase in spam. This may or may not be a targeted attack. It might just be a new wave of spam that your anti-spam filters haven't learned to cope with. Or it could be a concerted effort to get you to click something that'll install a trojan. Or it could be a sign that you are infected and your email has been harvested and passed on to hundreds of other spam networks.

4: You start having data and program execution errors. This is a big problem. It can mean your hardware is failing. But it also means you could have a malicious virus or piece of malware.

5: Your friends start to complain about getting spam from you. Again, too late. You are already in trouble.

6: Your computer locks up and keeps locking up. Even worse if it does it with a password and demand for cash. If the latter happens do not do ANYTHING to the computer. Do not touch the keyboard, do not turn it off. Instead, call a computer security expert and the police. Your computer and data can be recovered by someone who knows what they are doing.

We will be posting a follow up piece on what you can do to protect your computer and your network next week. In the meantime, here is some background and some suggestions from McAfee and from the Justice Department.

Thanks to Owen Linderholm

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