I came across some interesting spam samples today. The messages all come from Yahoo Mail servers.  They are all from compromised Yahoo accounts.  They are sending all stock spam, the typical pump and dump variety that we’ve seen for years. But...

A quick follow up on my previous post about spam from an Android botnet , there are a few things I need to point out: Sophos discovered the same thing on their Naked Security blog : The messages appear to originate from compromised Google Android smartphones...

I read an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal today entitled Cyber Criminals Sniff out Vulnerable Firms .  It’s a story of a small business owner in New York whose company was broken into by cyber criminals and stole $1.2 million from...

I decided to take a look at the relationship between the rate of software piracy and the rate of malware infections.  If you pirate your software, are you more at risk of getting infected with malware?  It sounds plausible so I decided to investigate...

Today is my 8-year anniversary of fighting spam.  It was July 12, 2004, that I got the job at Frontbridge as a spam analyst and we headed down to Los Angeles for 4 weeks of training.  Here’s a recap of 8 general trends that have happened since...

Every once in a while, I find a great tool on the Internet that you can use to help you be more secure.  Here are two that I have found especially useful: Should I change my password ? There have been a tons of password breaches this year – Zappos...

As I wrote about on this blog previously, I am working on an app for iPad.  It has nothing whatsoever to do with security but instead blends three of my interests: travel, writing and technology (you’re all going to download my app, right? ...

A few weeks ago, the New York Times published an article saying that the Stuxnet worm, which infected a large number of Iran’s nuclear power plants, was a joint effort between the United States and Israel.  The program began under former president...

Over on the New York Times blogs page, writer Nicole Perlroth writes about how security company SpyEye, in conjunction with Spamhaus, worked together to take down the Command-and-Control centers (C&C’s) associated with the grum botnet, purportedly...

The other day, a new piece of malware, dubbed “Mahdi'”, was discovered on various computers in the middle east.  Seculert reported on it the other day on their blog , saying that they had stumbled on it a few months ago.  A piece of spam arrived...

Wired yesterday reported about an initiative that Hotmail is working on that combats gray mail – mail that isn’t spam or legitimate mail, but is in-between, a shade of gray.  Gray mail is bulk mail and some people want it, while others do not. ...

This past December, private geopolitical analyst firm Stratfor was hacked when hackers from the Anonymous group broke into their servers and posted users’ passwords and credit card information online.  My credit card information was among them and...

Brian Krebs is running a series on how to break into the Computer Security field. These are in response to inquiries that he receives and that these types of posts of his are very popular.  So, he went and started talking to people who are well known...