E-commerce and credit cards in particular are always considered to have succeeded in overcoming the big problem of fraud. All too often when a new security mechanism is presented to combat credit card fraud its opponents claim that fraud in credit card transactions is already mitigated to an adequate extent. This does not seem as a false claim as we don’t see Visa, Mastercard, or American Express going bankrupt due to fraud. The fraud figures are not too bad either considering the fact that no state-of-the-art mechanism is deployed yet for the masses.

However, trying to make an online purchase recently made me lose any respect I had for the so-called anti-fraud mechanisms that are used today.

Continue reading "Today's Credit Card Fraud Prevention -- Throwing The Baby With The Bathwater?"

About one week ago, a serious commercial espionage system was discovered in Israel. For years, several large-scale companies in Israel enjoyed inside information about their competitors using private investigators who were using a Trojan horse application that was planted on victims’ workstations. More details can be found in this Globes article.

Obviously, the topic made it to the national news primarily because it involved high-profile companies in Israel, companies that “everybody knows", and because it led to the arrest of several top executives. It’s the first time such a large scale espionage act is discovered in Israel, and this is new, but the rest is not.

Continue reading "Trojan-Horse Espionage in Israel -- A Tip of an Iceberg"