Consumer Security on the web, information to assist you in practicing safe computing
From the category archives:
One of the biggest supermarket chains in the USA fell victim to online fraudsters.
Evidently, no one at Minnesota-based Supervalu bothered to confirm the authenticity of emails sent in late February. Purporting to come from two of the company’s suppliers, the messages instructed Supervalu to wire all future payments to new bank accounts.
Supervalu wired $10m into the fraudulent accounts. Sheesh.
The Register article.
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AOL has been in the news for laying off employees and moving their headquarters to Manhattan, New York City.
Bill Pytlovany blogged this with a new twist:
I never signed up or requested Emails from Side Step. The Email was very careful to follow the minimum requirements of the Can-Spam Act of 2003. Having this Email “Certified” by AOL means nothing to me other than “Advertising OnLine” was paid by this company to spam my Email account.
Silicon Alley Insider: Randy Falco Email to employees.
Time Warner: Randy Falco Bio.
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For those going through ‘Simple Tagging’ withdrawal after installing WordPress 2.3 with native tags, you will be pleased to know Amaury Balmer has released Simple Tags.
For WordPress 2.3 only, now you have no excuse not to upgrade. 
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The biggest overhaul since Live Search’s debut in January 2005 includes:
Streamlined look, feel and speed. Content specific searches.
Enhanced ranking algorithms, larger index sizes and autospell correction.
http://www.live.com/
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Websense Press Releases.
STUDY: SMBs Overconfident in Their Information Technology Security
SAN DIEGO August 27, 2007 — According to independent research released today by Websense, Inc. (NASDAQ: WBSN), small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) fail to take adequate steps to reduce the risk off data loss from Web-based security threats. The SMB State of Security (SOS) survey of 450 IT managers and employees within the United States shows that while 46 percent of SMB IT managers say they have software to protect company confidential data, 81 percent do not use software to block the use of peer-to-peer applications, block USB devices (80 percent), control the use of instant messaging (76 percent), or stop spyware from sending out information to external sources (47 percent) – all growing vectors of confidential data loss.
Despite the risk of data loss, 20 percent of SMBs do not use Internet security software other than firewall and anti-virus products, as they mistakenly feel these are sufficient. Additionally, 12 percent of IT managers admit, while they have an Internet usage policy, they have no way of enforcing it.
The study also found that business-owned computers are left vulnerable to security threats for more than 21 days, on average, despite the daily updates promoted and offered by operating system and anti-virus vendors. In fact, only 4 percent of SMB employees have daily security updates on their work PC, while 11 percent of employees say the security software on their work PC has never been updated.
On the bright side, 94 percent of SMBs claim to have an Internet use policy in place, and 67 percent say that all companies should have equal levels of protection from Internet security threats, irrespective of their size.
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U.S. District Judge Michael Davis sentenced e-mail spammer Christopher William Smith (27), to 30 years in prison for running an illegal Internet pharmacy that sold about $24 million in prescription drugs.
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TRUSTe Blog: RelevantKnowledge Removed from TDP White List for Three Months
After notification by several sources, TRUSTe investigated a distributor installing comScore’s RelevantKnowledge on consumer machines through a security exploit.
The RelevantKnowledge application was observed being installed via a security exploit amongst several other applications. The following describes the series of events observed:
- The user visited an unauthorized distribution web site.
- A series of hidden frames were loaded containing links to dozens of other websites, including sites containing code designed to test and trigger security exploits on the user’s machine.
- by way of these exploits, a cascade of maliciously installed software was downloaded/installed onto the user’s machine without any form of consent. This software included RelevantKnowledge.
Sunbelt Blog: comScore gets a spanking
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Security company BitDefender reports a new threat, dubbed Trojan.Spammer.HotLan.A, using automatically generated Yahoo and Hotmail accounts to send out spam email.
“There are only about 500 or so new accounts being created every hour,” commented head of BitDefender Antivirus Lab Viorel Canja. “But still, we’ve seen 15,000+ Hotmail accounts being used so far. It’s hard to estimate how many spam e-mails have already been sent.”
Microsoft MVP and friend Corrine Chorney, was the first guest in a series of interviews to come at Windows Vista for beginners, “Getting to know the Microsoft enthusiasts.”
I rather like this sentiment:
Beyond the number of views and blog analytics, this belief that I have always held was illustrated by Sean O’Driscoll, Microsoft General Manager, Customer Service and Support Community and MVP, in his blog post where he wrote: “3 people helped each day, “paid forward” by each person helps 4.7M people in two weeks.”
We’ve been pleased with the response to the program, which has enabled thousands of multi-computer families to upgrade more than one PC in their home to Windows Vista.
You can still take advantage of this offer until 11:59 PM Pacific Time on 30 June 2007.
Bring Home More “Wow”
This work by http://certifiedbug.com/blog/ is licensed under Creative Commons
Quoted material is © of original author
