I’m off to the Virus Bulletin conference in Vancouver for the rest of the week.  While there, I will be presenting a session entitled “The Psychology of Spamming.”  This presentation doesn’t focus on the psychology of the spammer, but rather...

TechFlash has an interview with a Microsoft senior attorney Richard Boscovich.  Boscovich is a former federal prosecutor that Microsoft hired in 2008 and has been newsworthy recently for taking down the Waledac botnet in February 2010. Read the full...

This past week I got a message from a spammer who was spoofing Facebook.  I didn’t notice this message until this past week because our spam filters caught it and delivered it to my spam quarantine.  I find that these days I don’t have the insight...

Today, I got an email from my car insurance, Geico.  I quite like Geico.  I find their website intuitive and easy to use (when it works… there have been times when it is down) but they send me payment reminders, allow me to make adjustments...

Over the past week or so, I have seen a flurry of malware activity that has been escalated to me. Of course, the most famous of these is the “Here you have” spam campaign that contained a short message with a purported link to a .pdf...

Back in February of this year, Microsoft got a court order which ordered various registrars to disable various websites that were associated with the Waledac botnet.  This court order was unusual (well, more like it set a precedent) in that Microsoft...

Last weekend, myself and numerous other sources reported on the “Here you have” email worm.  As you recall, this was a spam campaign with a link to malware hosted on a free web hosting service.  This spam campaign was brief but sent a huge flurry...

Earlier this week, Yahoo Finance posted an article (courtesy of CBS MarketWatch) about six things you should never post on Facebook.  Two of them of note were your vacation plans and your home address: Home Address Do I have to elaborate? A study...

I came across ComputerWorld’s article today on a new strain of malware known as Stuxnet. Normally, I post excerpts from this but in this case I will repost the entire thing. It’s a good read because the sophistication of Stuxnet surpasses...

Well, here’s something I didn’t expect to write about – my very own Hotmail account has had its username and password accosted by spammers! I have a very old one that I opened up years ago.  I use it to subscribe to bulk mail services and use it...

On Friday, Sept 10, 2010, Microsoft finally released an update to its Microsoft Outlook Junk Mail Reporting tool.  This is an update for Outlook 2007 SP2 or later, or Outlook 2010.  This is not an upgrade for the existing version, it is an entirely...

Randall Stross, writing for the New York Times last week, has a good article up about the necessity of strong passwords.  For those of us in the security industry, when we say “strong passwords” what we mean is one that has a lot of characters (usually...

Two days ago on Sept 9, a new worm started propagating throughout the Internet.  I wasn’t going to comment on this except that there have been a couple of incidents close to me where this has come up (family member asked about it, people were discussing...

This post isn’t spam, malware or security related.  It’s a story about nice, visual formatting. If you look at the way I write my blog posts, or if you worked with me saw the way I do my slide decks in PowerPoint, I try to make judicious use of white...

A long time ago I started tracking spam from the big 4 web mail services – AOL, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft (Hotmail).  The trends didn’t change very often and it was usually pretty consistent over the time frames that I observed: AOL was the cleanest...

It sure seems like I am having a lot of debates with my co-worker lately about the nature of mail filtering.  Why do I say this?  Because I had one today.  This one is over the issue of trust. I can’t remember whatever it is we were discussing...