I have way too many user accounts.  I can’t use the same password everywhere, but so many of these also force me to use different usernames.  I can’t remember them! I went to the web page for Morgan Stanley Smith Barney and I forgot my username...

Below is a 6-minute video, starring me (among others) about what it’s like to be a SpamCop.   When I filmed it, I remember thinking “Gee, this will be entertaining!”  But when I saw it on the big screen with everyone watching, I thought “Gee...

As a follow up to my previous post, I’d like to comment on the Reuters article where WikiLeaks is publishing hundreds of thousands of internal emails from security think tank Stratfor: WikiLeaks did not say how it had acquired access to the vast haul...

I admit, I was fooled. As I’ve written previously , private intelligence service Stratfor was hacked in December, my information was leaked and since then I’ve been getting spear phishing messages.  Yesterday, I got another one and I admit, I was...

Sometimes I hear people or read writers that say things about spam that are incorrect.  I thought I would clear those up in this blog post. December is spam season When the holidays roll around, people start warning other people to watch their inboxes...

If you’ve been to the MAAWG web page lately, you may have noticed that they have updated their name and logo: The big change is the expansion from a focus primarily on spam to spam, malware (on computers), and mobile malware. I wrote back in October 2009...

A couple of days ago, the New York Times reported on a study by Cascade Insights that measured the effectiveness of the spam filters in Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail.  The results?  Hotmail and Gmail are about equal in terms of how good they...

The other day on pastebin , snippets of an email conversation were posted with members of the hacking group Anonymous discussing plans to conduct DOS attacks against the Internet’s root name servers: To protest SOPA, Wallstreet, our irresponsible leaders...

I wonder how much botnets reuse IP addresses.  Do they infect a system and spam, get blocked, discard the IP and move onto the next (new) one?  This means that they have a nearly unlimited supply of IP addresses.  Or do they infect a system...

Sometimes I read articles about the size of botnets.  For example, this article on Krebs on Security is called “ Who’s Behind the World’s Largest Spam Botnet? ”  Krebs names grum as the biggest botnet. How is the size of the botnet measured...

The other day, security writer/worker (what doesn’t that guy work on these days?) developed a handy-dandy little game called “ Phish or Fake .”  He wrote about it in his blog post here . In the game, he shows you a domain like BANCOFAMERICAN.COM...

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...