TED Talks | Misha Glenny: Hire the hackers!

9/11 Spam/Scam Preparations

Get ready for massive spam, scam, fake charities and scareware in general on the 10th Anniversary of the WTC attacks of 9/11. Most security blogs and AV companies are posting their concerns about that day and prepare their services for the onslaught of malicious content.

Post by ESET.

Google Services CleanUp

Google announced "Fall spring-clean". Google will clean, over the next few months, services and products that didn't quite take-off. Google's reason for this is: "This will make things much simpler for our users, improving the overall Google experience. It will also mean we can devote more resources to high impact products—the ones that improve the lives of billions of people."

Some of the products will have a negative impact to some developers. For example, the discontinued development of the Google Maps API for Flash.

This is the list of doomed products and services:

• Aardvark 
• Google Desktop 
• Fast Flip 
• Google Maps API for Flash 
• Google Pack 
• Google Web Security 
• Image Labeler 
• Notebook 
• Sidewiki 
• Subscribed Links

Read More About it Here

Microsoft is poking Google

Microsoft's latest Office 365 campaign is punching Gmail Man in the face, for peeking inside your emails to display relative ads. This is true, for the web client. If you access your email from a desktop client, you get rid of all the pesky ads. Google is claiming that algorithms do the dirty job and no human ever sees the contents of your email. Which of course would be ridiculous to think that humans can manage to scan billions of emails every day.

Winehouse Dies, Spammers Get To Work

It's tragic to see a 27year old woman die, and more tragic to see how inhumane people can be. Symantec posted on their blog that spammers got to work early on, when the news about the death of the singer was still being scares. Taking advantage of the human curiosity. The attack vector used by the spammers was an email containing an attachment, "loosely disguised" as an image, with the subject related to Winehouse's death.

Read the entire post here.

Twitter scam alert!

If you got a Direct Message in twitter saying: "Someone said this real bad thing about you in a blog" with a short URL following the message! DON'T CLICK! You'll only get infected/hacked/hijacked... etc ;)

Facebook Scam Alert!

If you see a Wall post about a video on the Oslo bombings, it's a scam and it will infect your computer. Avoid clicking!

Android Phone Owners, beware of malware!

Symantec posted an article on their security blog about the ever increasing threat of malware on smartphones, particularly smartphones running the Android OS platform. So android smartphone owners, beware of malware!

Tips:
Even if a piece of software is coming from an official source, like the Android Market, it doesn't make it safe or secure. Even reputable developers might have a ticking time bomb waiting on their apps.

Make sure to always read the comments and see the ratings on any software you're about to install on your smartphone. Always search the web for even more info about that software. Read all the requested permissions before installing, be suspicious of software requiring an endless list of permissions.

Read more about it here.

Are we loosing the internet?

Found a good speech about internet security threats by Mikko Hypponen, an internet security researcher employed by F-Secure.

A really cool infographic!

Created by: Online Schools

1300+ FB Likes! Thank you!

Cyber Attack Victims Keep Pilling Up

Cyber attack victims keep pilling up, this time the target was CCP's MMO EVE-Online. At the time of this writing, the game's official site and the game network itself were offline. The group behind the attack was LulSec, and they posted a tweet on their Twitter profile about the successful DDoS attack on CCP's networks.

Update: CCP took down the entire network as a security precaution.