Displaying items by tag: Spam

There is a common belief that Linux and BSD operating systems are, by their nature, much more secure than anything Microsoft has ever released. The problem with this belief is that it is simply not true. Linux, BSD and Windows can all be made more secure than they are by default, but there is work involved and there is a tradeoff of ease of use when you start locking things down. Many web hosts running Linux or BSD do not really have the time or available man power to really lock their host systems down which leaves them vulnerable to a number of attacks.

Adblock Plus, a popular application for blocking various advertising content that lavishes users on the Internet, is launching a new option to block unwanted content on popular social networks. Through special additives that can be found on the website YouTube Customizer, it is possible to block YouTube features that are not desirable.

In a career that has spanned over 20 years in IT I have met a lot of people from different industries. Many of these people I have not kept in contact with and some I have. Occasionally when talking to some of them something will be said that might not hit home until a little later. This was the case with something that was said to be by an acquaintance who just happens to work as a technical manager at a security consulting company. During our talk I mentioned that it seemed like systems were getting much more insecure, and he joked saying: why would any security company want to work themselves out of business?

Remember Path? You know them, the social community that was accused of abusing access to their members’ mobile address books? Well they are at it again. The problem popped up not that long after they got into trouble for collecting information illegally including personal information about minors. They were reprimanded and fined $800,000 (which to a large business is still not that much). You would think they would have learned their lesson about this. Sadly it still seems to be an issue and Path argues that it this is all about maintaining the user experience.

Two spammers from Great Britain have received a large penalty for sending spam to mobile phones, according to the BBC. They were given a penalty in the amount of 440,000 pounds. The duo was emitting around 840,000 texts daily through the company they founded to recipients who without a doubt did not want to receive those messages. They "wasted" about 70 SIM cards daily that were connected through the device to the computer and then they used them to spam the messages until they used all available limits.

No sooner has Facebook given pages the ability to make offers to people then we see one of the first cams using the new system. Now, we all know that Facebook has to do something to keep people interested and in particular they need to give businesses the ability to push their products on other Facebook users. This can help Facebook generate more revenue… blah, blah, blah. However Facebook really does need to do something about their anti-spam and scam detection tools they are pretty much non-existent.

Facebook is facing something of a crisis of identity. Back when the company was still privately held everything looked very solid for the social networking giant to build into a behemoth and then push into the public market raking in even more cash. The reality of the situation was not so bright and cheerful as multiple analysts have commented on. Simply put Facebook did not turn out to be a good initial development for multiple reasons. Still we have to give them credit, they are trying to turn things around and we may possibly see Facebook turn things around financially.

Digg is officially back online and already it is off to a bad start. The newly reinvented page has decided that instead of using their own login procedure they are going to require people to log in with Facebook. This is probably one of the worst things that Digg could have done. Almost anything would have been preferable to using Facebook for the login path. Digg’s excuse of doing this to limit spam is not going to fly with many people either as there are a number of methods to prevent spam and still allow people to setup their own accounts.

Remember the Faceboook malware we warned you about? You remember the one that relied on the fact that people love to see pictures of themselves on the internet? Well it looks like either the same group that was behind that malware or another equally clever group has moved from Faceboook to Twitter. We have heard multiple reports of tweets showing up that claim to have a link to a picture of the user. Unfortunately due to the widespread use of shortened links it is hard to spot many malicious payloads. Fortunately in this case you can identify the bad link by the .ru at the end… for now.

Hearing about a flaw in one product from a competitor in a product is sort of like asking your dog what food he likes best. You know you are not going to get a good answer and, of course, the dog is only going to stare at you and eat pretty much anything (including a bug…). So when we heard that a Microsoft Anti-Spam Engineer was reporting a new Android based email spam botnet we took it with a grain of salt (remember Microsoft has a new Phone OS coming out soon).