October 28, 2009- Albuquerque, NM- There will be a lot of press regarding Gil Baca and his legal troubles but it is important for me to point out that the overall security industry is still plagued with problems. The industry has received a lot of notice from the general public and the news media over the last couple of years but we have yet to see any substantial changes.
We haven't seen much leadership or policy/ discussion that positively effects the security industry from the NM Private Investigator's Board. Take a look at the news on the STATE WEBSITE. The previous Board Superintendent was Mr. Steve Herrera and he seemed to be getting acclimated but he was replaced with a new Administrator a few weeks ago. The Board was using an outside investigative service and a former APD Investigator to investigate complaints but I was told by license clerk Michelle Medina that the Board no longer uses this firm. She said that Steve Herrera is now investigating complaints. Each month, I see many dismissals of complaints and we never hear about any actions taken against illegal or non-compliant companies.
RLD Superintendent Kelly O'Donnell told a few news reporters that a good handful of companies were being investigated and that RLD had referred a number of cases to the Attorney General but I unaware of any cases that have been adjudicated.
Unlicensed activity is rampant and still very obvious to licensed companies. Unlicensed or illegal companies advertise freely in the open in directories across the Internet. Look at a few below (unlicensed companies are more prevalent than the licensed firms):
The list of illegal companies is long and they create many problems, just like Gil Baca's companies. Think about the potentially unpaid employees, scammed clients and vendors, etc.
Security consumers must beware of the problems in this industry and understand that they need to do diligence when choosing a security company that, at minimum, should include a state security license check. CLICK HERE for the state website. There are plenty of good companies out there that operate under all laws and comply with regulations. Please take the time to find one and report unlicensed activity.
The spam campaign, entering its third week now, is showing no signs of slowing down, according to Gary Warner, director of research in computer forensics with the University of Alabama at Birmingham. This one campaignaccounts for about 10 percent of the spam e-mail that his group is presently tracking, he said. "This is the most prominent spam-delivered virus in the world right now," he said.
Since first spotting the spam on Sept. 9, antispam vendor Cloudmark has counted 11 million messages sent to the company's nearly 2 million desktop customers, said Jamie Tomasello, abuse operations manager with Cloudmark. That number is "very high," she noted.
The messages typically have a subject line that reads, "Notice of Underreported Income," and they encourage victims to either install the Trojan attachment or click on a Web link in order to view their "tax statement." In fact, that link takes the victim to a malicious Web site.
The IRS says not to open attachments or click on links included in e-mail that claims to come from the tax-collection agency.
What makes this campaign particularly ugly is that the malware that accompanies the fake IRS messages is a variant of the hard-to-detect Zeus Trojan. This software hacks into bank accounts and drains them of money as part of a widespread financial fraud scheme. Researchers estimate that the Zeus criminals are emptying more than a million dollars per day out of victims' bank accounts with the software. Small businesses have been particularly hard-hit by this fraud, because banks have sometimes held them accountable for the losses.
Testing a recent variant of Zeus on the VirusTotal Web site, Warner found that only five of the 41 antivirus detection systems used by VirusTotal managed to spot it.
Although antivirus vendors have other techniques for blocking the malware -- they can stop people from visiting the malicious Web sites, for example -- the spam is giving the companies a run for their money.
"It's difficult to stay ahead of it via antivirus because the Zeus binaries are changing a few times a day to evade detection," said Paul Ferguson, a researcher with Trend Micro, via instant message. "It's definitely a problem."
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