RUSSIAN HACKERS TARGET ANDROID TAXI APPS.

Now, researchers at Kaspersky Lab have found an Android trojan that collects payment card data from taxi & ride-hailing apps.

This move makes perfect sense, as most ride-hailing apps won't even let users sign up if they don't enter payment card details. This means that users are conditioned to handing over payment card data. Furthermore, most apps regularly forget previous data, and an app requiring a user to re-login or re-enter card details isn't that out of the ordinary.

The first such banking trojan to phish mobile taxi apps is named Faketoken, and its latest version only targets ride-hailing apps for services operating in Russia, along with mobile apps for paying traffic tickets issued by the country's Main Directorate for Road Traffic Safety.

"As we’ve seen many times in the past, cybercriminals constantly steal ideas from each other, so it won’t take long for them to adopt the same trick in other countries," said Alex Drozhzhin, security researcher for Kaspersky Lab.

And the Kaspersky expert is perfectly right, as we've seen this happen many times before. Give it a few months, and US and international users will be targeted as well. It may not be via a Faketoken instance, but there are plenty of mobile banking developers more than glad to expand their tools with new capabilities.

Faketoken can also operate as Android crypto-ransomware

Faketoken is a mobile banking trojan that was first mentioned in a 2012 F-Secure report, has also been quite active in 2015, and had previously added support for a crypto-ransomware component at the end of 2016.

Currently, the trojan supports overlaying fake login and phishing screens for about 2,000 financial apps, being one of the most advanced and well-maintained tools on the market, albeit it's used predominantly for targeting Russian users.

http://bit.ly/2fQjhFG 

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MADRID

A Madrid taxi driver has been handed a seven-year jail sentence after raping a teenage au pair who fell asleep in his cab following a night out.

The Spanish capital's provincial court convicted the unnamed taxi driver for his attack on a 19-year-old South Korean au pair who was returning from a local nightclub with friends.

The court heard that earlier this year the teenager and a female friend caught a taxi at 4.30am to return home after partying with a larger group at the Joy Eslava nightclub, in central Madrid.

The au pair, who is also a student in the capital, fell asleep in the car, under the effects of a night of heavy drinking, the court heard.

The 60-year-old unnamed taxi driver dropped off the first girl, but he did not take the au pair to the Montecarmelo neighbourhood, north Madrid, where she lived.

Instead, judges heard he took her to the sparsely populated Casa de Campo, a large parkland area, back towards the centre of the capital.

It was there, prosecutors said, he raped the sleeping au pair in the back seat of the taxi, during the incident she woke up and fought her way out of the car. She was later found by a police patrol at a nearby motorway roundabout.

Defence lawyers for the taxi driver said he had only tried to wake up the sleeping teenager, and on doing so she became disoriented and fled the car.
But the court heard that police took the teenager to nearby La Paz hospital, where doctors found she had been sexually assaulted.

"It cannot be denied that the accused had sexual contact", said judges, according to Spanish broadcaster SE12.

The court also said the taxi driver must pay €55,000 (£50,000, $66,300) to the teenager and set an exclusion order, banning him from coming within a mile of the au pair.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/madrid-taxi-driver-guilty-raping-122959788.html 
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Mansfield District Council

A bemused Warsop taxi driver who forked out on an environmentally friendly electric car was snubbed by staff at Mansfield District Council when he inquired about a Hackney Carriage licence because his vehicle doesn’t have an engine.

Ryan Smith, 33, from Warsop, told your Chad he contacted the licencing department at the authority on three occasions, and said he was told by staff that because he could not state the vehicle’s cc, he could not make an application.

Ryan, who drives for ACE-ABC in Mansfield, also applied to Bolsover District Council, who welcomed the Tesla electric car with opened arms because of its environmentally-friendly credentials.

Ryan said: “It would be nice to work in the district I live in.

“When I rang the licensing team at the council they originally turned the car down because it has no engine cc.

“They then told me a few weeks later when I rang again, that it could not be licensed because they can not provide any infrastructure, which doesn’t make sense because the council do not provide charging points.

“It is a pity for them it would have shown the council in a positive light.

“It would not have cost them anything. I gave both councils the same opportunities and when I rang Bolsover they were all for it .”

The car which was around £85,000 new has a boot in the front and back of the car because the motor is small enough to sit under the back seats.

Ryan picked up his new car on Monday, August 14.

He said: “It is an expensive car and I did buy it myself .

“I think it is a bit backwards that they are not accepting my car as a taxi as it is more economical.”

Ryan started taxing in the car on Monday, August 21 in the Bolsover area.

He said: “I had the same problem with Mansfield District Council when I tried to bring in hybrid cars a few years ago.

“The electric car will do 268 to 310 miles off one charge.”

A spokesman for Mansfield District Council said: “Mr Smith has not submitted an application for a taxi licence to Mansfield District Council, so it would be difficult to comment on the merits of any application.”

http://www.chad.co.uk/news/council-says-no-to-electric-taxi-1-8708767