September 2010
85 posts
Not Always Right: Constant New Viruses Are Such A... →
“Can you recommend a perfect anti-virus to use on my computer?”
Computerworld: Spam wars 2010 →
“There’s a spam war raging in North America, and computer users are losing.
Worse yet, many of us don’t even realize we’re being attacked or why.
Most users see spam as an annoyance, and don’t look past their cluttered inboxes to the true severity of the threat to every aspect of our online world.”
The Onion: New 'Do Not Kill' Registry To Allow... →
“Obviously, we understand there are many Americans who would rather not be disturbed at dinnertime by an ax-wielding maniac, and that’s why we are providing this service….”
CAUCE: The Canadian Fighting Internet and Wireless... →
“While the delays in getting an anti-spam bill have been frustratingly slow, this is a Mom and Apple-pie issue (does anyone truly want to take the pro-spam side?); politicians could glean some much-needed goodwill by getting C-28 into law as quickly as possible.”
threatpost: Spamhaus Debuts New Whitelist Service →
“The Spamhaus Whitelist will exclude by default any IP address or domain that sends marketing or soliciting mail at all….”
North Coast Journal: Rise and Fall of a Spam... →
“Over the next five years Singleton and ASIS filed a steady stream of lawsuits against a variety of alleged spammers. As with the targets of Singleton’s ADA suits, plaintiffs often chose to settle confidentially out of court because, guilty or not, it’s usually cheaper than going to trial. White estimates that during this period she netted $40,000-$50,000 per year from settlement...
“I get a lot of story ideas from Box of Meat. It is No. 1 on my “favorites” list....”
– Ken Magill, in The Magill Report
(if we had appropriate tchotchkes, we’d send him one -BoM)
Computerworld: Man gets 10 years for VoIP hacking →
“Edwin Pena, 27, was convicted in February of masterminding a scheme to hack into more than 15 telecommunications companies and then reroute calls to their networks at no charge. He must also pay more than $1 million in restitution, and will be deported once his sentence is served.”
Ben Laurie: The Tragedy of the Uncommons →
“The pattern here is that some good self-promoters come up with a cool idea, hype it up to journalists, who cannot distinguish it from the other incomprehensible cool stuff we throw at them daily, who duly write about how it’ll save the world. The interesting thing is what happens next. The self-promoters now have to deliver the goods.”
The Last Watchdog: Why more self-replicating... →
“Soaring popularity is proving to be a blessing and a curse for Facebook and Twitter. Hackers and spammers have staked out new turf for attacking the über popular social networks. And it will take the good guys some time to shore up defenses.”
Wired: Comcast.net Hijackers Sentenced to 18... →
“…the pranksters got control of the Comcast.net domain with two phone calls and an e-mail sent to the company’s domain registrar, Network Solutions, from a hacked Comcast e-mail account.
That gave them entry to the Network Solutions control panel for Comcast’s 200 domains.”
The Denver Post: Colorado colleges cash in big on... →
“By selling coveted mailing lists that can number into the hundreds of thousands of names — and even include athletic boosters and school donors — the schools have set up a never-ending stream of revenue that takes little more than a signature to feed. …Colleges say they’re merely helping students learn financial responsibility; ...
Bank Info Security: Phishy Credit Union Closed →
“The so-called Whitestone Credit Union had a website, a toll-free number and all the bells and whistles of a real brick and mortar establishment — everything that it needed, in fact, except it was only a sham institution out to nab consumers’ personal data.”
New York Times: Webloyalty Settles With New York... →
“The settlement is the second in an ongoing investigation into the discount club industry. Companies that worked with Webloyalty including, Ticketmaster, Pizza Hut, Orbitz Worldwide, Shutterfly, and MovieTickets, will also be required to pay a collective total of $3.3 million for consumer refunds, education and fees.”
Computerworld: Obama can has interwebz wiretap? →
“President Obama’s White House is seeking legal powers to secretly wiretap any internet communications — including encrypted peer-to-peer protocols, such as Skype. Naturally, the reason they want it is to do with terrorism, ‘cos these folks don’t use the phone system so much these days. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers jump up and down in horror and rage.”
threatpost: Google Warning Gmail users on China... →
‘Warnings appeared when users logged onto Gmail, encountering a red banner reading “Your account was recently accessed from China,” and providing a list of IP addresses used to access the account. Users were then encouraged to change their password immediately. Based on Twitter posts, there doesn’t seem to be any pattern to the accounts that were accessed, though one...
itbusiness.ca: Alleged 'domain slammers' lose... →
“The authority responsible for Canada’s dot-ca domain names will defend against a lawsuit from a registrar they’ve denied recertifying…linked to the Domain Registry of Canada — a company that allegedly mails out reams of misleading advertisements that resemble official-looking invoices.”
Gary Warner: NPR CyberWar Part One: I Beg to... →
“I’ll have to review the transcript more carefully, but from the first pass listen as I drove to work this morning, I believe I disagreed with every single point in the entire story.”
Gary Warner: Twitter Hack: From "Harmless"... →
‘The underlying discovery for all of the Twitter mischief yesterday was that when a URL was followed by an “@” sign, whatever followed the @ sign would also be interpreted as part of the URL. The primary use of this activity yesterday was to show that a URL, even a short and unresolvable URL such as “http://t.co/” could be followed with an ...
Clients From Hell: Our website needs to open 3... →
“1. To continue reading you need to add our website to your favorites. 2. To continue reading you need to make our website your homepage. 3. Please fill in you e-mail to continue reading.”
pricechopperfail: Price Chopper Attacks Customer's... →
The Last Watchdog: Twitter, Facebook spam surges... →
“Users are likely to sound the first alarm, messaging each other about the danger. Technicians will then scramble to patch the hole. Meanwhile, spammers will push through as much spam as they can during their window of opportunity.”
ZeroPaid: UK MP: Sections of the Digital Economy... →
“Liberal Democrat MP Julian Huppert criticizes the idea that an IP address can identify anybody at all, and more importantly, that such an important piece of legislation was hurried through with minimal debate and actually voted on by a tiny minority.”
Concurring Opinions: Are People Really Harmed By a... →
“In many data security breach cases, courts are dismissing claims not because companies practiced reasonable security and weren’t negligent — indeed, in many cases, companies were grossly negligent, even reckless. I’m continually stunned by how shoddy security practices keep occurring — such as the all-too-common lost laptop with millions of unencrypted records of consumer data. ...
NPR: Extending The Law Of War To Cyberspace →
‘Under the U.N. Charter, states have the right to go to war if they come under an “armed attack” from another state. But there is no consensus yet on what that right means in the event of an attack on a country’s computer networks.’
MediaPost: Advertising Is NOT Content →
‘Advertising is a value exchange between people and marketers. Any good marketer should be able to put themselves into their consumers’ shoes — and once in those shoes, should be able to answer the question “What is my time worth?”’
Michael Dayah: Spam unsubscribe links no longer... →
“The CAN-SPAM act then strongly bifurcated spammers. Some came into the light and followed the rules, using relevant subjects, no open relays, understandable language, and an unsubscribe link that supposedly functioned. Other went underground, doing their best to skirt the content filtering with nonsense text and day-old Chinese landing domains.”
InformationWeek: Larry Ellison Hammers... →
‘“Salesforce.com is really one or two applications on the Internet,” Ellison said. “It’s basically just a salesforce-automation app on the cloud, and is primarily just SaaS apps with a very limited platform.
“It is not virtualized; in fact, it’s just the opposite,” Ellison said. “With Salesforce.com, hundreds of thousands of customers have...
The Tech Herald: ZoneAlarm marketing alert mirrors... →
“A pop-up alert greeting users of Checkpoint Software’s ZoneAlarm Free Firewall over the weekend caused some rage, as users genuinely thought they were infected by a variant of the Zeus family of Malware. As it turns out, the pop-up was just an advertisement, but it is the look and feel of the warning driving the complaints.”
The Daily WTF: Similar to Snail Mail →
‘Reggie’s company assembled a new release of their web application for generating address lists. The previous release had allowed customers to retrieve names and addresses, but many customers had lobbied for a cheaper (for them) alternative. They wanted just the addresses and a “slug”, like “To our neighbor at”, “To the petlover at”, or...
Softpedia: Government-Sponsored Anti-Botnet... →
“…ISPs play a critical role as they monitor their own networks for botnet activity and identify the offending IP addresses. Then they notify affected customers via email and direct them to the new anti-botnet center. The center maintains a special website with information and tools that people can use to clean their computers. If this is not enough they can also call a hotline...
Financial Times: Web group to screen bogus drug... →
‘The changed approach was disclosed in an amended securities filing for Demand Media’s planned initial public stock offering. The filing says LegitScript will assist eNom “in identifying customers who are violating our terms of service by operating online pharmacies in violation of US state or federal law”.’
ProjectVRM: Do we have to “trade off” privacy? →
‘What I’m saying here is that, on the Web, we do all our privacy-trading in contexts that are not out in the open marketplace, much less in our own private spaces (by any of the above definitions). They’re all in closed private spaces owned by the other party—where none of the rules, none of the terms of engagement, are yours. In other words, these places can’t be private, in the sense...
Wall Street Journal: Spate of Lawsuits Over... →
“Since July, at least six suits have been filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California against websites and companies that create advertising technology, accusing them of installing online-tracking tools that are so surreptitious that they essentially hack into users’ machines without their knowledge. All of the suits seek class-action status and accuse...
Wall Street Journal: On the Web, Children Face... →
‘The Journal examined 50 sites popular with U.S. teens and children to see what tracking tools they installed on a test computer. As a group, the sites placed 4,123 “cookies,” “beacons” and other pieces of tracking technology. That is 30% more than were found in an analysis of the 50 most popular U.S. sites overall, which are generally aimed at adults.’
Computerworld: Facebook wannabe Diaspora hit on... →
“The sort of security issues he discovered include cross-site scripting flaws, code injection vulnerabilities as well as authentication and authorization flaws.”
threatpost: Twitter Closes Web Hole After Attack... →
“Engineers at social network Twitter.com plugged a vulnerability in the company’s main Web page after attacks that exploited the hole may have hit more than 500,000 users.”
Wired: Google Apps Gains Extra Security With... →
“Instead of just relying on a password set by the user, the two-step verification process will force users to log in with something they know (their password) as well as something they have (a PIN number sent to their mobile device).”
Kognitio: Companies waste $3.8bn a year on... →
“While British firms spend almost $7.6 billion a year on email marketing efforts, the lines between legitimate marketing emails and spam are blurring: more than half of respondents (52%) who responded to the survey said they see no difference between marketing emails and spam, and completely ignore it all. As a result, $3.8 billion of that expenditure is wasted, and may be doing more...
Pogo Was Right: Echometrix agrees to stop... →
“Echometrix…sells parental Internet monitoring software which allows parents and guardians to keep track of what their children do on the Internet. In June 2009, Echometrix began offering a program…marketed as a way for third party companies to get insight into what children privately said about products and services. Echometrix did not disclose to parents and guardians...
Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood: Kids Are... →
‘With marketers increasingly trying to blur the line between advertising and content online for adults, it’s hardly surprising that kids can fail to separate the two.
But unlike adults, children — especially those under the age of six — were unaware of the concept of advertising, while older kids may know about ads but couldn’t always distinguish them. ...
Computerworld: Is Stuxnet the 'best' malware ever? →
‘The Stuxnet worm is a “groundbreaking” piece of malware so devious in its use of unpatched vulnerabilities, so sophisticated in its multipronged approach, that the security researchers who tore it apart believe it may be the work of state-backed professionals.’
Dasient: Continued growth in web-based malware... →
“Hackers have been very busy and are constantly coming up with new attacks. It’s therefore not surprising that our infection library has catalogued almost 200,000 different infections - up 58,000 from the previous quarter. Here are the details….”
Law.com: Company Hit With $459 Million Judgment... →
“The case, originally filed in 2003, targeted American Home Services Inc. for sending unsolicited fax advertisements to 306,000 class members in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.”
DarkReading: Majority Of Consumers Have Been... →
‘While consumers generally appear fatalistic about online crime, they aren’t happy about it. Fifty-eight percent described themselves as “angry” about the state of cybercrime, and 51 percent said they were “annoyed.” Forty percent also described themselves as feeling “cheated.”’
SF Weekly: FarmVillains →
“Many successful companies have their original sins — corners cut, bridges burned, allies trampled. In Zynga’s case, former employees say, its towering commercial edifice was built on a particularly shaky ethical foundation: copying the products of competitors. And while in the games industry, as in the fashion industry, some degree of design similarity is expected, Zynga has...
Privacy Law Blog: Recent Lawsuits Challenge Use of... →
“Four recent lawsuits filed against some of the Web’s biggest media companies challenge the alleged use of Flash cookies capable of circumventing a user’s ability to prevent the tracking of online behavior.”
CyberCrime & Doing Time: "Here You Have" Hype &... →
Gary Warner digs deeply into the numbers and claims behind the “Here You Have” virus, finding some exaggerations — and possibly some scary truths.
Salon.com: "Adult services" is officially dead →
‘In prepared statements for a House Judiciary Committee hearing on sex trafficking, the company’s public relations director, William Clinton Powell, said of the “terminated” section: “Those who formerly posted adult services ads on Craigslist will now advertise at countless other venues. It is our sincere hope that law enforcement and advocacy groups will find...