Chris Brook

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"Distrust and caution are the parents of security" - Benjamin Franklin

AOL Lifestream’s Fail Bunny

The thing about the Twitter Fail Whale was that it was just so darned festive looking that you could hardly find it in yourself to be angry at Twitter for crashing (yet again). AOL seems to be playing up the “we’re too cute to be mad at” angle big time for Lifestream, a social network aggregation service. Instead of a 404 page, you get the Lifestream fail bunny – an amorphous, round eyed, pink thing. It seems the effect may be opposite of what AOL intends, though – the Lifestream fail bunny practically screams at you to be tormented.

The Reddit Fail Snoo

If you’ve used the bookmarking site Reddit, you’ve no doubt noted the cute little alien that is the company’s mascot. According to our research, the alien is actually called the Reddit “Snoo,” though it’s unclear whether anyone at Reddit refers to it by that name. Given the creature’s resemblance to Al Capp’s (copyright protected) Shmoo, plausible deniability around the thing’s name may be the best legal course of action.

Hootsuite’s Fail Owl

Hootsuite is everyone’s social media management platform – allowing mere mortals to manage complex social media campaigns across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the like. And Owly, its wide-eyed mascot, has become synonymous with the service. But, like any Web-based service, sometimes Hootsuite just can’t find the page you’re looking for. To make the best of a bad situation, the site features a praise-worthy “404 Fowl Not Found” page that depicts Owly on the back of a carton of milk.

Welcome to the Zoo

by Chris Brook

Everybody knows the Twitter Fail Whale, but Twitter’s hardly the only flaky Web service out there, and the Fail Whale is just one creature in a whole Fail menagerie that’s sprung up in recent years to soothe hacked off Web users. Check out Threatpost’s Fail Zoo: a collection of the strangest fail creatures on the net.

Week in Security: Stuxnet Revelations and Black Hat Happenings

by Chris Brook
2

Stuxnet chat saturated the news this week after the New York Times got the cyber security echo chamber going with a story delving into the mysterious worm. But Stuxnet was hardly the only news this week, which also saw new research from the Black Hat Briefings conference in Washington D.C. and progress on the strange disappearance of security researcher Dancho Danchev. Read on for the full week in review.

Spammers Moving to Social Networks

by Chris Brook

Its not just Wall Street giants like Goldman Sachs that see dollar signs hovering over Facebook. Spammers are hopping on the social networking giant to fool users, according to a report from security firm Cloudmark. Spammers are using botnets to send a barrage of malicious e-mail spam that mimic e-mails from social networking sites. 

Cybersecurity for your growing business
Cybersecurity for your growing business

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