Microsoft has issued a warning against phishing scam practiced by perpetrators over the company’s Xbox Live network. Meantime, Sony is struggling the consequences of a massive security breach reported this week. The warning posted on the Xbox Live support page says that the phishing scam appears to be directed at those people playing "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2" online:

Digital River has received a patent for a new technology called Electronic Commerce System and Method for Detecting Fraud designed for online purchases.

A new banking Trojan was created by cyber crooks to steal funds from people’s accounts even when they logged out. A finding published by Trusteer, the transaction security firm, shows that the new Trojan dubbed OddJob allows hackers to hijack customers’ online banking sessions in real time using their session ID tokens. As the session remains open perpetrators can freely rob people of their money. The Trojan was discovered several months ago, but the firm is only now able to report it following the conclusion of a police investigation.

Banking customers in Poland were hit by a version of the Zeus malware that intercepts one-time pass codes sent via SMS. On Monday the security vendor F-Secure blogged about the attack on the clients of the Polish financial institution ING. The issue was further analyzed on the website of security consultant Piotr Konieczny. The new attack appears to be the same type found by the Spanish security company S21sec last September.

Chief Executive David Wei leaves Alibaba.com Ltd along with Chief Operating Officer Elvis Lee on the grounds of being responsible for fraudulent activity by users of one of the company's platforms. The decision comes into effect immediately.

Cybercrime costs the British economy £27 billion ($43.5 billion) each year according to a new stats reported by the government. The Office of Cyber Security & Information Assurance and consultancy Detica reported that the amount includes a £21 billion cost to business, of which £9.2 billion results from theft of intellectual property (IP) and £7.6 billion from industrial espionage.

The Merchant Risk Council (MRC), a merchant-led trade association announced today the finalists for the 2011 MRC Emerging Technology Awards (METAwards) that recognize the most innovative payment, fraud and security tools in electronic commerce – as judged by a diverse panel of online and multi-channel merchants.

Scammers have hammered out a new scheme that may defraud unwitting people of big amounts of money. Now the scam is related to WikiLeaks. Victims who are supposed to be rich enough are called by an automated system that states their computer and IP address "had been noted as having visited the Wikileaks site, and that there were grave consequences for this, including a $250,000 or $25,000 fine, perhaps imprisonment". Panicked marks are given a dedicated phone number to discuss payment terms if, certainly, these people are stupid enough to be deceived by the trick.

Companies are suffering high losses due to a scam scheme that targets businesses posting help-wanted ads online. Thus, it has already fleeced one company of $150,000, according to an advisory from the FBI that warns other businesses to be wary.

Chase Paymentech has launched a new suite of solutions to protect online merchtans against fraud and POS merchants against data breaches. The new services are dubbed as Safetech™ Fraud and Security Solutions.

Visa continues its course of strengthening fraud detection through investments in modelling software. The global payments network states that now it is detecting over twice as much fraud on the riskiest transactions using the new systems. Besides, it can also detect more than three times the amount of fraudulent cross-border fraud than was previously identified. Visa has implemented a number of alterations to update its global processing platform, called VisaNet, developing new fraud models that enhance the speed and accuracy with which Visa detects attempted payment card fraud.

Ukash, an e-money network, is partnering with iovation, the Device Reputation Authority™ protecting online businesses from fraud and abuse, to deploy iovation’s ReputationManager 360 for global fraud protection across its growing line of e-commerce payment services.

Phishing is thriving on the ignorance of the Internet users as half of the victims respond to the fraudulent emails within an hour of the receipt of scam messages, according to a study by transaction security firm Trusteer. Going further, the statistics shows that within 5 hours 80% of victims have responded with the figure raising up to 90% within the first 10 hours of an attack. The statistics stresses the urgency for the fight against fraudulent websites that attempt to hoodwink the unwary into handing over online banking credentials or similar sensitive information.

First Data signed a referral agreement with Laru Crop to provide its FundsXpress business online banking customers with enhanced automated clearing house (ACH) fraud prevention solution helping thus more easily comply with new industry requirements. Laru creates ACH risk management, compliance and fraud detection and prevention applications for financial institutions. With the long-term, renewable agreement First Data takes to a higher level its business online banking risk management capabilities, making another layer of protection available through Laru's ACH Clarity product.

American Express agreed to acquire Accertify Inc, a leading provider of solutions to prevent online and other card-not-present fraud transactions. Launched in 2007 Accertify provides a hosted software application that offers an extra level of security for transactions over any of the major payment networks, including American Express, Visa, MasterCard, Discover, PayPal or any other alternative payment method.