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“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” ― Kurt Vonnegut
Controversy has erupted around the free online dating site, PlentyofFish.com, after the Web site was
found to contain a serious security vulnerability that could have potentially exposed the personal
information of some 30 million users.
The FTC doled out $8 million in fines to the operators of an online
scareware scheme. The scam involves tricking consumers into thinking their
computers are infected with malware and then selling them software to remedy problems
that doesn’t exist in the first place.
Facebook announced yesterday that they will begin offering
secure HTTPS connections and a new verification method called social
verification to users of the most popular social network in the world.
A piece of fake anti-virus scareware, Antivirus 8, has been
infecting computers via ICQ in recent days according
to Roel Schouwenberg at Securelist.
What makes this fake antivirus popup intriguing is that it appears infecting
users who are not actively using their computer.
A New Jersey school district was vandalized by members of the online mischief making group 4chan after an administrative password to a student record management system used at 160 school systems across New Jersey.
The Web site of the U.S. military’s Communications-Electronics Command (CECOM) was off line on Monday after reports that access to the site was among those being fenced by hackers in an underground forum.
Attacks
that use search engine optimization to push malicious pages into the top rankings on search engine results are on the rise in 2011, but new research from zScaler suggests that efforts to identify and block the pages are paying meager dividends.
The Zeus Botnet continues to evolve and shift in focus from
its traditional targets, banks and their customers, to other money-handling
institutions like electronic money and online payment systems, according to a new
report.
The shift has been going on for months and likely follows
policy moves by banks to protect themselves and their customers from the
malicious theft of personal and financial information.
The recent merger of the Zeus and SpyEye botnets has created a mega-botnet that promises to increase the effectiveness, complexity, and prevalence of malware across the Web, according to a blog post by Francois Paget of McAfee Labs.
After a lull in the fourth quarter of 2010, spam appears to be back in full force, according to reports from both Websense, Commtouch and Symantec Corp.Spam volume was up 45% in the first half of January after diving in Q4 according to a Commtouch spam report.
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