Case Study Of Phishing

Another threat is Phishing, it is the fraudulent practice of sending emails pretending to be from reputable companies in order to lure individuals to reveal personal information, such as passwords and credit card numbers.

In the second quarter of 2000, AOL settled with the SEC with regard to its’ previously discussed controversial accounting policies. AOL agreed to pay a $3.5 million fine and to reissue earnings statements for years 1995 and 1996. By so doing, it wiped out all the profits the company had made. In the 4th quarter of 2002, AOL registered its’ first decrease in subscriptions with a loss of 200,000 members. Every quarter after that showed additional losses, until at the spin off in December

Many people receive unsolicited mail offering preapproved credit cards, but throw this mail away. Criminals can use this information to activate and use the credit card.

Beside this mistake, America Online has made more mistakes; another example is music they offered on a program disc, where the allocated URL belonged to a competitor. All mistakes could have been avoided with better research and preparation. AOL should try to anticipate these mistakes in the future, by adjusting their marketing approaches to different countries and their cultures. AOL should realize that its American approach is perceived in many other countries as too aggressive, thereby offending not only local competitors but also national consumers.

There are a few examples of phishing such as deceptive phishing, spear phishing, CEO fraud, and pharming. Deceptive phishing is when fraudsters impersonate a legitimate company to steal people's personal information or login credentials. Spear phishing is a method of phishing that is targeted to specific individuals. Next, CEO fraud is when the fraudsters impersonate the executives in an attempt to fool the employee into executing unauthorized wire transfers, or confidential information. Pharming is a method of attack which stems from domain name system (DNS) cache poisoning.

In 1983 AOL began life in large part thanks to Bill Von Meister, and only had one product. In fact the company was first called Control Video Corporation. In 2015 as a company was sold to Verizon for 4.4 Billion. To say at the very least, AOL did something right as a corporation over the years. The first product they every came out with was called GameLine, which is a service that hooked your Atari 2600 to your phone line to rent games for 1 dollar (fastcompany). Not soon after it’s beginning, Control Video Corporation collapsed and over 90 % of its staffed were fired. However out of the ashes of Control Video Corporation, in 1985 Steve Case founded “Quantum

On July 31, 2006 AOL Packaged into a database roughly twenty million Internet search records and made this publicly available for download for a period of approximately ten days. The data consisted of records of which internet sites were visited by nearly 658,000 AOL members who conducted such visits from approximately March 2006 to May 2006. Data also contained the addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, social security numbers, passwords and other personal information. In December 2007 Kasadore Ramkissoon and doe 1 and Doe 2 filed a class action suit in the District Court of California on behalf of themselves and a nationwide putative class of AOL members stating that AOL had violated the Federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act,

According to MR.K.Kathirvel (2013,p.176), there are three categories of credit cards fraud: card related frauds, merchant related frauds, and Internet-related fraud. One of the fraud most occur around the world is internet related Fraud. This type of fraud occur in the world every minute. Because most of the people see internet advisements that shows in the phone and computer. They try to test this advisement by using the credit cards. So, the thief founder of the application use the credit card and make the crime. Another way is using email, the thief sent the mail that same of the bank mail and this mail include web-link. If the user click the link simultaneously the thief will get credit cards information. The second one is lost or stolen. Most people carry bank cards and personal identification cards in their wallet. This information can be used to commit a fraud or it can be sold to criminals.

As a mass media corporation, AOL is always focused on providing the customers with network services which are convenient and easy to use, and this is exactly what Stephen Case looking for, who was the founder of AOL. In 1990s, AOL has already took steps in online market and gained huge profits, they put lots of advertisement online while not so many companies noticed the great potency of internet, they cooperated with Amazon and Barnes

AOL was one of the first internet service providers in the United States. American Online founded in 1985 by Steven Case and Jim Kinsey in 1985. A few years AOL introduced a few new features to their company such as instant messenger or also known as AIM. This allowed AOL of convert from an hourly service to a free service. That same year, AOL became a publicly traded company.

Being the fastest growing crime of today, it is estimated that every 79 seconds an identity is stolen (Consumer Reports 13). Empty promises made by solicitors in spam e-mail offer a free gift in exchange for personal information. These solicitors have no intention of sending any free gifts, but their scams help them obtain the private information desired. If enough information is given, criminals are able to apply for credit cards, apply for a fraudulent loan under the victim’s name, and make illegal withdrawals from random bank accounts. This is only one of the many ways a person’s identity could be stolen (O’Reilly).

Phishing scams are attacks by social engineers who pretend to be from a legitimate business or organization and use fear tactics to get the recipient to divulge sensitive information. Attackers use a variety of tactics to trick the recipient to believe these emails are legitimate most commonly by spoofing a website that appears to be genuine.

The next steps in this process are the added touches of concealment for their evil deeds. They immediately change the address for mailing to a new address so that the original owner does not get any items that are ordered delivered to them or notifications of the profile changes. Then they change the method of billing from paper to email with a factious email address. Now that they have completely altered everything on the profile page, the new profile in your account has been created and they have free access to shop on line. In a more devious act, lets add an extra step to this process. The criminal will first make a small purchase to test the waters to see if the transaction will go through. If so, the criminal will follow through with a much larger purchase that in some cases will max out the credit limit for this holder. The more advanced criminals who know how Company X’s credit program works, will make an online payment using an Automated Clearing House (ACH) process to pay the card off in full using fraudulent bank information. With the ACH, the credit line is tricked in assuming a payment has been made and opens up the full line of credit for additional purchases. In the next few days this process will continue and in about 48 hours when the ACH is declined due to an invalid account, the charges are reversed back to Company X. By this time, the credit limit has been cleared and maxed three or four times and the victim is unaware of all of this

The first recorded cyber crime took place in the year 1820! That is not surprising considering the fact that the abacus, which is thought to be the earliest form of a computer, has been around since 3500 B.C. in India, Japan and China. The era of modern computers, however, began with the analytical engine of Charles Babbage. Cyber crime is an evil having its origin in the growing dependence on computers in modern life. In a day and age when everything from microwave ovens and refrigerators to nuclear power plants is being run on computers, cyber crime has assumed rather sinister implications. Major cyber crimes in the recent past include the Citibank rip off. US $ 10 million were fraudulently transferred out of the bank and into a bank

Internet fraud is an increasing threat to our technological society, which thrives on the advances and benefits of the Internet and e-commerce. With the increased growth and dependence of the Internet, creative individuals have found ways of conveying fraudulent schemes as legitimate goods and services. Not only does Internet fraud cause harm to individuals and institutions, but it also damages the consumer confidence of valid Internet businesses and e-commerce. There are many forms of Internet fraud which Internet patrons need