Security researchers in England have unexpectedly stumbled across a bunch of hackers who are scamming other scammers.

It seems some people in Morocco who go by the handle Mr. Brain, are offering free set-up kits to all comers. The software is available on a Web site hosted in France. It allows you to quickly throw up fake sites that look like the sites of well-known banks, eBay, PayPal, etc. It even details the information the phony site will collect from visitors who fall for the scam, such as IDs, passwords and other confidential data.

But what the scammer using this software does not know is that all the info that is collected is emailed straight to Mr. Brain! I guess there is no honour among thieves, as the saying goes. It is good, perhaps, that the hackers are targeting each other. But on the whole, it probably increases the number of criminals out there, and the number of phishing attacks.

It is hard to tell how many of these scammer starter programs are active on the Internet at any given moment. One was seen recently, targeting the Bank of America.

As I have said often in the past, it is easy to protect yourself from these types of . Just follow this one simple rule: Anytime you want to go to the Web site of your bank, broker, utility company, eBay, PayPal, etc., launch your browser and TYPE (do not copy and paste) the URL into the address bar. Or, of course, click on your Desktop icon or Favorites link. NEVER click such a link in an email or on a Web site.

Syd Tash is a noted computer security consultant and author of How to Protect Your Computer Online. He has been keeping Internet surfers safe and secure since the last century. Find out how he does it; protect your own computer with five layers of protection right here:
= > http://MyPCSecuritySite.com

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