Just in the past year...

This article is the archived version of a report that appeared in June 2009 Consumer Reports Magazine.

Credit-card breach

Heartland Payment Systems, of Princeton, N.J., a credit-card processor that handles more than 4 billion transactions a year, found malicious software in its database that resulted in the theft of consumers' credit-card numbers and expiration dates.

Pop-up imposter

Visitors to legitimate banking sites were ambushed by pop-ups that looked as though they came from the financial institution. Actually, they were planted by hackers to get customers to reveal their passwords.

Stock scam

Scammers used old news stories on publicly traded companies to influence current stock prices by manipulating search engines so that the stories topped the results of searches on the companies' ticker symbols.

Celebrity come-on

Phishers posted fake profiles of Beyoncé and other stars to the social-networking site LinkedIn. When users clicked on the profile, their computer was infected by malicious software.

Blackout

The country of Kyrgyzstan was knocked off the Internet for more than a week after its biggest ISPs were targeted by a flood of requests that clogged its servers. Experts suspect that a Russian "cyber-militia" was behind the attack.

Trouble in Tibet

A wide-reaching cyberespionage unit infected hundreds of diplomatic and political targets and had access to potentially sensitive documents from the office of the Dalai Lama, according to Toronto-based researchers.

On the defensive

The L.A. Times reported that Department of Defense networks, including those in the U.S. headquarters overseeing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, were infected with malicious software. The military suspects that the source was in Russia.

No stimulus

Numerous Web ads claimed large sums of government money awaited consumers. If you fell for them, you might have been enrolled in a grant-search program that could have cost up to $90 a month.

Disappearing president

At the time of the inauguration, a series of e-mail claimed "There is no president in the USA anymore." A link in the messages led to a fake Obama-Biden site that installed malicious software.

Dangerous video

Instant messages enticed Gmail users to "check out this video." Clicking on the link gave the scammers access to the users' log-in information and automatically forwarded the link to their contact lists. (There was no video.)