Phishing against Middle East banks continues. Some financial institutions are definitely more targeted than others. For instance HSBC Middle East and Mashreq Bank are phished daily, often with several attacks in 24 hours. Saudi banks have stepped up their efforts to fight against phishing. Earlier this year they introduced second factor authentication via one time passwords sent to mobile phones. This summer, second factor authentication has created difficulties for Saudi banking customers who either don’t have roaming on their phones or who are traveling to areas where text messages to Saudi mobile numbers cannot be received. Those individuals have been forced to leave their online banking services designated mobile telephone number in the custody of a close friend or relative so the SMS codes can be received and relayed in order to complete banking transactions or check on credit card accounts. To cope with this problem, SAMBA has two new security offerings which are certain to become popular. The first one designates a computer as safe so one time passwords aren’t needed to access online banking services. Banking customers may also purchase a SAMBA Authentication Token which generates a onetime password on login — so there’s no need for the password to be sent to a registered mobile handset.

Personal e-mail accounts of both expatriates and Saudis have been hacked. Now that many people store all their e-mail online indefinitely, hackers have access to a wealth of personal data. The old vacation scam has also been used on hacked e-mail accounts, with friends solicited for cash to help in a crisis overseas. People need to use stronger passwords to protect their e-mail accounts. Microsoft has some great tips to create better passwords at . In perhaps the worst security development, early this month researchers at Kaspersky Lab found the first Trojan threat against the Android platform. Due to the growth in the popularity of Android mobile devices the discovery is not surprising, but it means that the security honeymoon is over for Android.

McAfee’s Threats Report: Second Quarter 2010 showed that malware has reached its highest levels, making the first six months of 2010 the most active half-year ever for total malware production. McAfee found that there were 10 million new pieces of malware cataloged in the first half of this year. Threats on portable storage devices took the lead for the most popular malware, followed by fake anti-virus software and social media specific malware. Approximately 55,000 new pieces of malware appeared every day!

If there weren’t enough nastiness to contend with already, a lawsuit has been filed in the US which alleges that some well-known globally accessible websites have been secretly tracking the online activities of their users, including children. The lawsuit alleges that the information tracked “may include such things as users’ video-viewing choices and personal characteristics such as gender, age, race, number of children, education level, geographic location, and household income.” Other data acquired through the web tracking could reveal name, home address, e-mail address and telephone numbers.

While many Internet users regularly delete tracking cookies that record browsing behavior, the cookies created by Adobe’s Flash Player, which are called Local Shared Objects (LSO) are difficult to erase. LSOs can store information indefinitely and can contain personal information such as user names and passwords. Malicious websites take advantage of LSOs and collect personal information from unsuspecting web visitors.

To get rid of Flash cookies easily go to and use Simple Software’s free Kill Flash Cookies (KFC) application. Launch the app, press “Go,” and be horrified to see how many Flash Cookies get deleted. KFC works with Windows, Mac or Linux, so there’s no excuse to be vulnerable to this kind of threat.