April 30, 2009 - As the swine flu outbreak reaches near pandemic levels, cybercriminals continue to use the flu scare as bait to scam Internet users. About five percent of global spam volume now mentions “swine flu” to trick people into (continue reading...) Read more
April 29, 2009 - Following up on Chris Barton’s excellent blog the other day on swine flu spam, we wanted to take a closer look at the numbers….. Many people may not realize that the words “swine” and “flu” had really not been seen (continue reading...) Read more
April 29, 2009 - Money laundering is a process for concealing the origin of funds generated by illegal means. People generally associate money laundering with drug trafficking, gun smuggling, or corruption. But funds misappropriated by identity theft, phishing, and carding also have to be (continue reading...) Read more
April 28, 2009 - Many years ago, I had a checkbook stolen. My husband and I were only married for a few years, had a toddler and not a lot of money in the bank. Somewhere in the few blocks between my daycare (continue reading...) Read more
April 28, 2009 - I get emails every single day from people who don’t know where to report things when they go wrong. They fear that they are being scammed on ebay, or have had their creditcard information stolen and misused. They don’t (continue reading...) Read more
April 27, 2009 - According to Consumer Reports, U.S. consumers have lost close to $8.5 billion to cybercrime over the last two years. Unfortunately many people don’t know they have become a victim or even what cybercrime is. To help solve that problem, (continue reading...) Read more
April 27, 2009 - The Swine Flu pill spam has started and it’s taking a few Hollywood stars names in vain. Nothing out of the ordinary with the sites on the far end yet though I do expect Oseltamivir will get some (continue reading...) Read more
April 24, 2009 - Today I came across a program that claims to be an installer for the VLC media player. Innocent, right? Guess again. For starters, the installation file was different from that supplied by the legitimate VLC media player site. At (continue reading...) Read more
April 24, 2009 - RSA is pretty much over now and it has been a blurry several days. Some real good sessions, some real good panels. Lots of meetings and interviews and many old friends on hand (shoutouts to Dave Perry, Larry Bridwell, and (continue reading...) Read more
April 22, 2009 - Happy Earth Day! For the past 20 years, whether I have participated in Earth Day festivities or not, it has been a day of reflection for me. For many years, I thought about the impact humans have on the (continue reading...) Read more
April 21, 2009 - Update: Watch McAfee CEO Dave DeWalt’s RSA Conference keynote on Predictive Security and also view my video on the topic. The year started off really well for malware authors, with the Conficker worm infecting millions of computers. (continue reading...) Read more
April 19, 2009 - New variants of the StealthMBR trojan aka Mebroot rootkit have recently been spotted in-the-wild. These new variants are significantly different from earlier ones. StealthMBR has arguably been dubbed as the stealthiest rootkit ever seen. The new variants are using even (continue reading...) Read more
April 17, 2009 - 44% of teen boys we polled told us they had seen at least one naked photo of a fellow female classmate. And who are these girls? The slutty fast teens? The ones we would expect to do things like (continue reading...) Read more
April 16, 2009 - There has been a bit of chatter today about the first ever Mac-based botnet. This piece of malware actually appeared back in January of this year. Quite frankly there is not any functionality in this “bot” (some would (continue reading...) Read more
April 15, 2009 - With the very sad story of Jessica Logan in the news recently, “sexting” has become a catch phrase in the media. I find most parents still don’t really understand what it is and most kids don’t know what the (continue reading...) Read more
April 15, 2009 - Today McAfee has released The Carbon Footprint of Email Spam Report. The study looks at the global energy expended to create, store, view, and filter spam across 11 countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Mexico, Spain, the United (continue reading...) Read more
April 13, 2009 - So April 1st came and went, and it seemed that all might be right in the post-Conficker world… Of course, nothing is that easy. With the latest activity, there is also a continual flood of information out there. Below, I (continue reading...) Read more
April 10, 2009 - Pics, pics and pics! Taking, sharing and commenting on pictures and videos online is one of teens’ favorite pastimes. They take them using their cell phones, Xbox 360, pocket video cameras and wifi-capable digital cameras. They store them on (continue reading...) Read more
April 9, 2009 - Do you remember what the first goal of file infector distribution is? It is demand. Without demand, infected files may never be downloaded by end users. What is the second goal? To stay undetected by most AV products. A week ago we found (continue reading...) Read more
April 9, 2009 - Hi Folks, This morning I heard news reports that the south bay had a telecommunications fiber cut, but my friend Bob from Gilroy had texted me using his phone saying that the local Gilroy PD said it was some (continue reading...) Read more