Fraud E-mails 'From' FDIC Link Computer Users To Viruses

Nowadays cyber criminals are using fake messages claiming to be from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to deliver a virus capable of stealing unsuspecting victims' bank passwords and other sensitive personal information, says Gary Warner, the director of research in computer forensics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Warner says the spam is being delivered with one of two subject lines:-
1. FDIC has officially named your bank a failed bank
2. You need to check your Bank Deposit Insurance Coverage
Warner says that once the message is opened the spam asks users to visit a specific Web site, a link to which is included in the message. Those that follow the link are taken to a page that asks them to click and download a copy of "your personal FDIC insurance file." "Unfortunately, anyone who clicks that download link will be downloading a version of the Zeus Bot virus, which has the capacity to steal bank passwords and other financial and personal information," Warner says. Warner and his research team in the UAB Spam Data Mine have been tracking the new spam for a number of days and report its delivery volume to be very high. The spam claims to be from the e-mail address consumeralerts@fdic.gov, which is a real e-mail address used by the FDIC, but has obviously been forged by the malware distributors in this situation, Warner says. "The cyber criminals behind this spam have gone to great lengths to mimic the logos and look of FDIC communications, including going so far as to forge an official FDIC e-mail address in an effort to confuse consumers into following links and downloading harmful programs," Warner says. "As is the case with any agency or company e-mail, do not follow links or click downloads embedded in the messages. Instead, visit the site in question through your Web browser and log in as you normally would," he says. "If an entity has an important message for you, you'll be able to find it on its Web page.

Now New Technology May CooYour Laptop

If some one say,”Does your laptop sometimes get so hot that it can almost be used to fry eggs?” New technology may help cool it and give information technology a unique twist, says Jairo Sinova, a Texas A&M University physics professor. Sinova and colleagues from Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory, Institute of Physics ASCR, University of Cambridge and University of Nottingham have had their research published in the renowned journal Nature Physics. Laptops are getting increasingly powerful, but as their sizes are getting smaller they are heating up, so how to deal with excessive heat becomes a headache, Sinova explains. "The crux of the problem is the way information is processed," Sinova notes. "Laptops and some other devices use flows of electric charge to process information, but they also produce heat. "Theoretically, excessive heat may melt the laptop," he adds. "This also wastes a considerable amount of energy." One approach may be found in Sinova's research -- an alternative way to process information. "Our research looks at the spin of electrons, tiny particles that naked eyes cannot detect," the Texas A&M professor explains. "The directions they spin can be used to record and process information." To process information, Sinova says, it is necessary to create information, transmit the information and read the information. How these are done is the big question. "The device we designed injects the electrons with spin pointing in a particular direction according to the information we want to process, and then we transmit the electrons to another place in the device but with the spin still surviving, and finally we are able to measure the spin direction via a voltage that they produce," Sinova explains. "Transmission is no problem. You can think for comparison that if the old devices could only transmit the information to several hundred feet away, with our device, information can be easily transmitted to hundreds of miles away," he says. "It is very efficient." Talking about its practical application, Sinova is very optimistic. "This new device, as the only all-semiconductor spin-based device for possible information processing, has a lot of real practical potential," he says. So wait and watch.