When consumer electronics shopping site Retrevo prepared for Mother’s Day by conducting a survey of parents’ social media practices, it found that nearly half (48%) of parents add their children as friends on Facebook. Parents admitted that “it can be awkward at times” when they follow their kids’ Facebook updates, but think that it’s probably…
PayPal users are at risk of getting their credentials stolen if they follow instructions given in a scam email. “We have reason to believe that your account was accessed by a third party…. PayPal will verify it with your bank records for your own protection. If you provide a wrong PIN your account will be…
Email hoaxes are nothing new, dating back at least as far as 1994 with what is widely believed to have been the first email hoax—referred to as the “Goodtimes virus” or the “Goodtimes virus hoax” after the subject of the email. The message in the early version was short and to the point, advising recipients…
For the second time recently, a security researcher has pointed out that running machines without administrative privileges could significantly improve security. Mikko Hypponen, the head of research at Finnish AV company F-Secure in an interview with The Inquirer, said a great way to stop a lot of malware would be to take administrative rights away…
In an excellent blog, the people from Apache did a very good job analyzing and documenting how a security breach happened–going through all the stages of the attack and drawing conclusions. Should you ever become the unfortunate victim of an attack, this blog offers an example of how to document it! I quote:”If you are…
On April 9th, Tavis Ormandy published a proof of concept about how to use the latest version of Java to compromise a pc. You can read about it here. He notified Sun, but they weren’t concerned enough to break their patch cycle, so he published the code. The problem is that when Sun released Java…
Of course I’m talking about football. When I say football I mean the game that is played with one ball thas is kicked with the foot, not the other game that is known as football in the US even though it’s played using the hands. Anyway I don’t like football at all, it’s too boring…
We have received reports of a malicious Windows Mobile game that creates significant phone bills to affected users. The game in question is called 3D Anti-terrorist action, and it’s manufactured by Beijing Huike Technology in China. The game itself is a 3D first-person shooter. Apparently some Russian malware author took the game and trojanized it….
Microsoft has made the right decision to temporarily turn off Hotmail’s vacation (e.g., out-of-office) reply feature. Flip the switch off permanently, I say. “In our fight against spam, we sometimes have to make hard choices, and we had to make one this week. We discovered that spammers were using Hotmail’s automatic vacation reply feature to…
The National Bureau of Economic Research has previously indicated that the United States has been in a recession since December 2007. What is interesting to note here is that Symantec first reported that spammers were showing an interest in the slowdown of the economy in October and November of 2007, so this begs the question,…