Brazilian underground: Beaches, carnivals and cybercrime

securelist.com

40 points·Sami_Lehtinen··6 comments

There's nothing to do with carnival or beaches, the headline doesn't make much sense, but yes there's cybercrime!

Stupidest title I've seen in a while. I thought there would be underground beaches and carnivals.

"in 2012 local banks lost around US$500 million for fraud perpetrated via Internet banking, by telephone, or through credit card cloning"

To put in perspective:

"In the U.S. the total annual fraud cost was $20.6 billion in 2012" http://www.tdbank.com/bank/security_identitytheft.html

Identity theft is still uncommon in Brazil. Also, people are used to filling out long forms because of our national bureaucratic mindset (it's not just the government, private enterprise is also very bureaucratic).

The result is that nobody blinks an eye at giving away _all_ their data. If you ask a complete stranger for his CPF (a number given by the Tax Service, a common Primary Key in many databases), they will give it to you.

We're lucky that most of our criminals just aren't very sophisticated (yet).

True. In many job interviews, people ask for your CPF (which is akin to a Social Security Number on the US, I guess) and even your parent's name. They probably check your (and your parents'?) criminal and debit history or shomething like that, but still, there goes all our data.

This is a global market. Brazilians can buy fake ATMs from Russia, rent botnets to Nigerians and commission computer trojans with Serbians.

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