A couple of days ago, I posted a link to a video by Microsoft parodying Gmail – the Gmail man.  In it, the video pokes fun at Google’s habit of making advertisements more relevant to its user base by extracting keywords from emails and using them...

Thanks to Anonymous and their Christmas hacking of Stratfor, I have not only had to change my credit card number and sign up for identity theft protection, I am also the target of spear phishing attacks. This past weekend, I got the following message...

I have to admit that this advertisement by Microsoft, poking fun at Google and Gmail – with an advert for its Office 365 service – is pretty funny. In it, they take shots at Google’s habit of scanning your email messages and extracting keywords and tokens...

Today, a consortium of companies including Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Paypal announced that they were collaborating and coming up with a new protocol known as DMARC – the Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance. What is DMARC...

I earlier wrote about an eTrade spam campaign that morphed into a Bank of America spam campaign .  Subsequent mutations saw this spammer use the same tactic over and over again, but slightly modify it.  We saw LinkedIn spam and “You have a transaction...

In case you haven’t been following the news, the US Department of Justice seized the file-sharing site MegaUpload, taking its domain names, $50 million in assets, and coordinated with law enforcement officials in other countries to arrest key employees...

In a story announced last week, Hotmail has released a new version of itself to help users deal with the problem of gray mail.  Gray mail is marketing mail that straddles the line between spam and ham; to some it’s spam, but to others it is legitimate...

During my 4-part series write up on SOPA, I approached it with a neutral tone.  I was hearing from everywhere that it was a horrible piece of legislation, but I wanted to find out for myself.  The goal was to look at it from the technical perspective...

Continuing on in my series on SOPA, here are some more arguments that people make against the legislation. 3. Other countries will get mad at the United States if they pass this legislation and retaliate Does anyone really think that if we start blocking...

Critics have numerous complaints about SOPA. Here’s one that is designed to scare the daylights out of you: Holy Festivus! The United States is the next China, Iran and Syria! Here are a few of the complaints: 1. It will require deep packet inspection...

Continuing on from my previous post , the SOPA process is this: A website based in China hosts a bunch of illegally obtained, copyrighted material. Let’s assume that these are all movies, and the website is called “http://myfreemovies.cn. The A-record...

Back in December, after I got back from New Zealand, I was off work for a week recovering from a medical procedure.  As I was browsing through my antispam RSS feeds, I came across SOPA and PIPA.  “Allo, wot’s dis?” I said in my New Zealand accent...

Okay, this is my final post on the Stratfor/Anonymous hack.  Probably. I’m a subscriber, and yesterday we all got a note from Stratfor founder George Friedman about the hack.  You can read it here if you so desire.  In it, he describes...

Ever since I had my data hacked by Anonymous during the Stratfor hack (and updated my credit card… and  subsequently some of my auto-payments at which point I sighed because I figured it was only a matter of time before I had to do it again), I’ve...

Blah, blah, blah. I was reading in a short article on Network World that the father of two-factor authentication, Kenneth Weiss, doesn’t think that Windows 8’s new picture password is any good. "I think it's cute," says Kenneth Weiss, who now...

This is a story that I missed when it was published last summer, but Wired has a great article about how the Stuxnet worm was discovered, analyzed, probable targets and probable authors.  If you’ve been following the e-security world for the past...

ComputerWorld has an article up where Microsoft is celebrating the fact that Internet Explorer 6 is now used by less than 1% of users in the United States.  From ComputerWorld : Microsoft today said its campaign to drive Internet Explorer 6 (IE6...

Following up from my previous post, the other prediction that IBM made was that in 2016, we wouldn’t use passwords to get to our important information.  Instead, we would use biometric data to authenticate ourselves. We would choose to provide certain...

As I wrote in my post on Christmas Day, Stratfor was hacked by Anonymous.  Since that time, here are a couple of updates: I signed up for Identity Theft protection from CSID .  I got an alert the other day indicating that according to all of...

IBM published a video where it predicts what the world will look like in 2016 (see bottom of this post for the link).  It includes the following five predictions: You will make your own energy: Anything that moves has the potential to create energy...

Last week, I wrote about eTrade spam hitting inboxes.  Today, we’re seeing the follow up from that: Bank of America spam. This looks identical to the previous run with one difference: it’s spoofing Bank of America.  Like the previous spam campaign...

 

As I was reading stories around the Internet, as per my daily ritual, I stumbled across Security News Daily’s Top 10 Biggest Security stories of 2011 , by Matt Liebowitz.  As I went through it, I thought to myself “What the—? Did these guys copy...

Well, here we are, the start of 2012.  If you’re like me, you’ve read a bunch of stories online about the top news stories, movies and books of 2011.  But what about the top 10 cyber security stories of 2011?  That’s what I am here for...

It’s the last trading day of 2011 (Friday, Dec 30 – although I am informed that it started yesterday) and what do I come into work to see? Spam spoofing eTrade.  Here’s a sample message: From : <redacted > Sent : Friday, December 30, 2011 7...