66.1 Host Locked

Having found a static pattern for identifying a Rock Phish domain a couple of months ago in the form of the bogus "209 Host Locked" message, the Rock Phishers seems to have picked up the finding and changed the default domain message to "66.1 Host Locked" as of recently. Here are the very latest Rock Phish domains using this :

business-eb.bbt.com.4rrt.es

ntu3ot1.com

nikogonet.com

ne5oe.com

nod-for-pc.com

sparkasse.de.4rrt.es

marip.com.es

Moreover, a recently released survey results by Cloudmark, whose study into the Economics of Phishing is also worth going through, indicates that current and prospective customers of a certain brand lose trust in it, if they're exposed to phishing emails pretending to be from that brand :

The survey revealed that:

- 42% of respondents surveyed feel that the trust in a brand would be greatly reduced if they received a phishing email claiming to be sent by that brand

- 41% of those surveyed felt that their trust in a bank would be greatly reduced if they received a phishing email claiming to be from that company, compared to 40% who felt the same for an ISP, 36% for an online shopping site and 33% for a social networking site

- 26% of those surveyed feel that they are the party most responsible for protecting themselves from phishing attacks, with 23% believing their Internet Service Provider (ISP) or email service provider is the most responsible and 17% thinking that the sender’s ISP and email service provider holds the greatest responsibility

The last point is perhaps the most insightful one, given it has to do with self-awareness and responsibility, forwarding the responsibility to the provider of the email service, and best of all, seeking more responsibility in fighting outgoing phishing and spam compared to incoming one.

Which CAPTCHA Do You Want to Decode Today?

Once you anticipate your success, you logically start putting more efforts into achieving a decent level of efficiency in the process of breaking CAPTCHA, now that's of course in between commercializing your know-how. CAPTCHA breaking or decoding on demand has been a reality for a while, with malicious parties empowered by proprietary tools, publicly available DIY CAPTCHA breakers, or services like this one doing it on demand.

The following service is offering the possibility for CAPTCHA decoding on a per web service basis, and enticing future customers by providing percentage of accuracy, the price, and the ease of difficulty of breaking it. CAPTCHA decoding is listed for the following services : 9you, tiancity, cncard, the9, kingsoft, taobao, dvbbs, shanda, csdn, chinaren, monter, and baidu. The hardest to break CAPTCHAs mentioned are those of Yahoo, Hotmail, QQ, Google. Moreover, Ticketmaster's the most expensive one, followed by Ebay's CAPTCHA decoding process.

What happens when malicious parties cannot directly decode the CAPTCHA? They figure out ways to adapt to the situation, namely by enjoying the benefits of the human factor in the process while sacrificing some of the efficiency, but continuing to achieve their objective.