-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Obscene. :-)
This is an example of some fun we have been having in the office the past few months -- watching Moriarty's "fantasy" pump-and-dump stock investments. Via the Zero Day Blog. [snip] Are pump-and-dump spammers really making money from hyping penny stocks in e-mails? Paul Moriarty has the answer and it's an eyebrow-raising sight. Over the last month, Moriarty, director of product development for Internet Content Security at Trend Micro, has been running a virtual portfolio of selling short on stocks found during spam runs. After 22 transactions in a five-week period, he has earned a whopping $25,610. Short selling (shorting) a stock is the act of profiting from a stock price going down. A short seller will typically borrow a security and sell it, expecting that it will decrease in value so that they can buy it back at a lower price and keep the difference. During Moriarty's research, he used data from pump-and-dump e-mails flooding into Trend Micro's spam honeypots. "As soon as I see activity on a particular stock, I'll short that and set a limit to cover after I've made 10%. In just over five weeks, I've turned a 25.6 percent profit on a $100,000 virtual portfolio. This is exactly what these spammers are doing. It's risky business but it's easy money," Moriarty said in an interview. "I made money on every transaction," he added. [snip] More: http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=119 - - ferg -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP Desktop 9.5.3 (Build 5003) wj8DBQFF8eStq1pz9mNUZTMRAkCGAKD+4OC2iu9u27uQhasjEEXoAxFGYQCg4sAg 5gDoJo6vyI6cCJguI2aOAp8= =okGf -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- "Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson Engineering Architecture for the Internet fergdawg(at)netzero.net ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts. https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.
