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Amazon has reportedly closed down more than 13,000 Pakistani seller accounts due to allegations of committing fraud. Small business owners opting to become Amazon Sellers is a trend that has been on a constant rise over the past few years due to government support under Pakistan Post’s different offerings to promote the cottage industry and increase the country’s exports. However, people with knowledge of the matter told ProPakistani that Amazon has closed around 13,500 accounts of Pakistani sellers. Amazon has reportedly declared Mian Chanuu and Sahiwal, cities in Punjab, as fraudulent red zones because sellers operating from these areas have been found involved in fraudulent activities. Sources have claimed that Amazon has also blocked the IP addresses from Mian Channu and now people from these areas are operating accounts from Dubai or through the computers of other clients. As per the details, the sellers are committing frauds in different ways which are being locally referred to as kabootar (pigeon trick), rickshaw trick, carding, and filing. Kabootar Trick Sellers use the Kabootar trick, i.e. use fake tracking, when the buyer orders the products from such fraudulent Amazon seller. There are two different websites that provide fake tracking. Usually, Amazon credits the amount to sellers within 14 days, however, such sellers inform the customers that it will take 15 to 20 days to deliver their orders. The customer does not raise any disputes by believing the sellers and Amazon transfers the amount to the seller after 14 days. Actual purchasers never get their products, and the fraudulent sellers make their money. Sellers reportedly earn thousands of dollars through this Kabootar trick. Carding People who create an account on a dark web website are mostly involved in carding. Such people buy hacked cards from such websites for $100 to $200 with complete details, including card number, expiry, and Card Verification Value (CVV). Such sellers use these cards to buy prepaid gift cards and sell those. This way, they can avoid getting caught by the authorities. Filing Another method is filing in which sellers receive the order on an Amazon account, buy it from another account but ship it to the original honest buyer. They create such secondary accounts on Sam’s Club, Walmart and different vendors and purchase the products that amazon customers had ordered and use the buyer’s delivery addresses. With some assistance from Sam’s Club’s staff, all the orders that have been delivered to Amazon customers are refunded as the same buyer gets delivery from one seller. The fraudulent seller receives the money from the buyer and the refund from the second vendor. Sales Tax Fraud in the US Some sellers are also misusing details of publicly available companies registered in the US. For example, they simply pick the company’s details from google and use it to buy Amazon Business Prime where they purchase the products for Amazon customers. This only works for Amazon to Amazon drop shipping, however. The seller picks the company director’s name, creates an email account and registers Amazon Business Prime accounts. After doing so, the seller uses the company’s EIN to remove tax on purchasing. At the end of the year, the company pays all the sales tax which they never received. Moreover, as per Amazon policy, they give a one-month free trial to their business customers. The sellers use these Amazon prime accounts for only 29 days and the day when the amount is deducted, they cancel that prime account and buy another one. NOTE:: This article is copyright by propakistani.pk and we are using it for educational or Information purpose only    

Cloudflare says a massive outage that affected more than a dozen of its data centers and hundreds of major online platforms and services today was caused by a change that should have increased network resilience. “Today, June 21, 2022, Cloudflare suffered an outage that affected traffic in 19 of our data centers,” Cloudflare said after investigating the incident. “Unfortunately, these 19 locations handle a significant proportion of our global traffic. This outage was caused by a change that was part of a long-running project to increase resilience in our busiest locations.” According to user reports, the full list of affected websites and services includes, but it’s not limited to, Amazon, Twitch, Amazon Web Services, Steam, Coinbase, Telegram, Discord, DoorDash, Gitlab, and more. Outage affected Cloudflare’s busiest locations The company began investigating this incident at approximately 06:34 AM UTC after reports of connectivity to Cloudflare’s network being disrupted began coming in from customers and users worldwide. “Customers attempting to reach Cloudflare sites in impacted regions will observe 500 errors. The incident impacts all data plane services in our network,” Cloudflare said. While there are no details regarding what caused the outage in the incident report published on Cloudflare’s system status website, the company shared more info on the June 21 outage on the official blog. “This outage was caused by a change that was part of a long-running project to increase resilience in our busiest locations,” the Cloudflare team added. “A change to the network configuration in those locations caused an outage which started at 06:27 UTC. At 06:58 UTC the first data center was brought back online and by 07:42 UTC all data centers were online and working correctly. “Depending on your location in the world you may have been unable to access websites and services that rely on Cloudflare. In other locations, Cloudflare continued to operate normally.” Although the affected locations represent only 4% of Cloudflare’s entire network, their outage impacted roughly 50% of all HTTP requests handled by Cloudflare globally. The change that led to today’s outage was part of a larger project that would convert data centers in Cloudlfare’s busiest locations to more resilient and flexible architecture, known internally as Multi-Colo PoP (MCP). The list of affected data centers in today’s incident includes Amsterdam, Atlanta, Ashburn, Chicago, Frankfurt, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Manchester, Miami, Milan, Mumbai, Newark, Osaka, São Paulo, San Jose, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo. Outage timeline: 3:56 UTC: We deploy the change to our first location. None of our locations are impacted by the change, as these are using our older architecture.06:17: The change is deployed to our busiest locations, but not the locations with the MCP architecture.06:27: The rollout reached the MCP-enabled locations, and the change is deployed to our spines. This is when the incident started, as this swiftly took these 19 locations offline.06:32: Internal Cloudflare incident declared.06:51: First change made on a router to verify the root cause.06:58: Root cause found and understood. Work begins to revert the problematic change.07:42: The last of the reverts has been completed. This was delayed as network engineers walked over each other’s changes, reverting the previous reverts, causing the problem to re-appear sporadically.

Former antivirus software creator John McAfee has died in what is reported to be a suicide as he waited for extradition to face tax evasion charges in the USA. McAfee was arrested in Spain in October 2020, where he was awaiting extradition to the US for allegedly not paying taxes on cryptocurrency, consulting, and other business arrangements. Hours after extradition was approved by Spanish courts, El Pais reported that McAfee was found dead in his cell from an apparent suicide where resuscitation attempts failed to revive him. “Prison officials have found him hanging in his cell, according to police sources, who say they treat the event as a suicide,” reports El Pais. For years, McAfee has been claiming that the US government wanted to kill him. A later tweet while he was in jail continued to show McAfee’s believe that people were out to get him. McAfee rose to fame after creating the antivirus firm McAfee Associates in 1987, which was later acquired by Intel in 2010. After leaving McAfee Associates in 1994, McAfee was involved in numerous other companies, such as Tribal Voice and Zone Labs, and more recently, the cryptocurrency company Luxcore. In more recent times, McAfee’s exploits, lifestyle, political beliefs, and zest for cryptocurrency have made him a cult figure for many. NOTE:: This article is copyright by bleepingcomputer.com and we are using it for educational or Information purpose only

Amazon Web Services  is currently having an outage, taking a chunk of the internet down with it. Several AWS services were experiencing problems as of early Wednesday, according to its status page. That means any app, site or service that relies on AWS might also be down, too. (As I found out the hard way this morning when my Roomba refused to connect.) Amazon  says the issue is largely localized to North America. The company didn’t give a reason for the outage, only that it was experiencing increased error rates and that it was working on a resolution. The irony is that the outage is also affecting the company’s “ability to post updates to the Service Health Dashboard,” so not even Amazon is immune from its own downtime. So far a number of companies that rely on AWS have tweeted out that they’re experiencing issues as a result, including Adobe and Roku.      

KARACHI: The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) on Monday allowed financial institutions to outsource hosting on the cloud to both domestic and international cloud service providers.  In Circular No. 04 of 2020 issued by the Banking, Policy and Regulations, the SBP said financial institutions, defined as banks, microfinance banks and development finance institutions (DFIs), can […]   NOTE:: This article  is copyright by pakistantoday.com.pk  and we are using it  for educational or Information purpose only

Registrants of .cloud domain names are in for a surprise when it’s time to renew them. The registry behind .cloud just notified its registrar partners that it is doubling the wholesale price of renewals from $7.50 to $15.00 beginning April 1, 2021. Registrars typically add a markup to the wholesale price. Oddly, it appears that the first-year price of .cloud domains has actually been higher than renewals until this change. The wholesale new registration cost had been $15.00, but in practice, people rarely paid this much due to promotions. For example, GoDaddy currently offers .cloud domains for $1.99 for the first year. .Cloud will remain less expensive than many other new top level domains. Still, I wonder if registrars need to change the wording they use in domain search results. Many registrars currently show the first year price and then “renews at” for the renewal cost. Based on what we’ve seen with new top level domains, this should probably read “Renews at X, unless the registry jacks up its prices.” NOTE:: This article  is copyright by domainnamewire.com and we are using it  for educational or Information purpose only

What is Ransomware? Ransomware is a type of malware from cryptovirology that threatens to publish the victim’s data or perpetually block access to it unless a ransom is paid. While some simple ransomware may lock the system in a way that is not difficult for a knowledgeable person to reverse, more advanced malware uses a technique called cryptoviral extortion, in which it encrypts the victim’s files, making them inaccessible, and demands a ransom payment to decrypt them. In a properly implemented cryptoviral extortion attack, recovering the files without the decryption key is an intractable problem – and difficult to trace digital currencies such as Ukash or Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency are used for the ransoms, making tracing and prosecuting the perpetrators difficult. Ransomware attacks are typically carried out using a Trojan that is disguised as a legitimate file that the user is tricked into downloading or opening when it arrives as an email attachment. However, one high-profile example, the “WannaCry worm”, travelled automatically between computers without user interaction. The biggest ransom ever paid In 2017, the Korean web hosting firm Internet Nayana received the largest ransom demand ever (a whopping $1.14 million), which they also ended up paying. During their negotiations, some of their data was permanently deleted. To make up for the incident, Nayana offered free hosting for life and refunds to its affected customers. So, of course, besides the actual payment, the ransomware attack involved additional costs and reputational damage.   Riviera Beach City, Florida, USA :: Amount paid: $600,000 Allegedly, right after an employee clicked on a phishing email link received on May 29, hackers managed to infiltrate into the city’s network and locked it up. All of the city’s online systems went down, including email and even some phones, and on top of that, water utility pump stations were affected as well. As a result, payments could only be accepted in person or by mail (only in cash or by check) and communication was conducted by phone. The City Council unanimously agreed to pay the ransom. The requested amount was 65 bitcoins, the equivalent of nearly $600,000. More than $300,000 from the city’s insurance policy was used to pay the ransom. The payment was officially made merely a few weeks after Riviera Beach agreed to spend around $1 million to replace the infected computer equipment. Riviera Beach’s attack looked similar to what Jackson County experienced in March, so it seems they were yet another victim of the Ryuk ransomware strain.   Lake City, Florida, USA Amount paid: $500,000 A second city in Florida paralyzed by ransomware agreed to pay the ransom: 42 bitcoins ($500,000). Even though their IT staff disconnected the systems within ten minutes of the attack’s detection, the ransomware managed to infect their network almost entirely. The police and fire departments were not affected, as they were running on a separate network. The people who needed to pay their bills could only do it in cash or money orders and they received handwritten receipts. Cybercriminals reached out to the city’s insurance provider a week after the infection took place and the ransom payment of 42 bitcoins was negotiated. The money was paid from the city’s insurance. Over 100 years’ worth of records (ordinances, meeting minutes, resolutions, and City Council agendas) were encrypted for almost a month. A few weeks after the ransom was paid, they did not even recover all of their data. What’s more, Lake City’s information technology director was accused of failing to secure the network and not recovering the data quickly enough and eventually lost his job. Lake City was another victim of the Ryuk ransomware strain. The Best Ransomware Protection for 2020 Bitdefender – Multi-Layer Ransomware Protection eScan – Advanced Protection against Ransomware Threats McAfee – Ransomware Solution AVG – Extra ransomware protection SonicWall – Stop Advanced Threats  Sophos – Advanced Protection from Ransomware Stealthbits – Crypto Ransomware Detection Netwrix – Mitigating the Risk of Encryption Ransomware Preempt  – Maza Ransomware- Protection   You can contact us for support or consultancy  at :: support@yi.com.pk