E-mail spam (including Trojan and virus messages), instant-message spam (“spim”), blog-comment spam, postal “bulk business mail,” and any other kind of unwanted, underhanded, and/or intrusive advertising. Also covers viruses, worms, and other malware.
This does look like a problem. Here’s an idea for an easy solution, though. In the address bar, the browser could display both the address (as it does now) and the script name. Unicode is split up into different well-defined sections for different language scripts, so this shouldn’t be very difficult to implement. In the …
Continue reading ‘“How Non-Latin Domain Names Could Be Used to Steal Your Money”’ »
And the game of cat and mouse continues, with the good guys looking decidedly mouse-like at the moment. I’m sure this is good for us, on the whole. It forces us to continue improving the state of the programming art, in much the same way that disease forces us to continue improving the medical arts. …
Continue reading ‘“Ruggedised botnets pushing out even more spam”’ »
The last paragraph is particularly heartening: FireEye researchers said the key to dismantling the giant ring was a coordinated effort that worked in multiple directions all at once so that bot herders didn’t have a chance to counteract. “As it turns out, no matter how many fallback mechanisms are in place, if they aren’t all …
Continue reading ‘“Security firm chokes sprawling spam botnet”’ »
Complete text of a spam I recently received: Get an omnipotent porksword! Omnipotent porksword?! Running out of synonyms, guys? 😀
I’ve mentioned before that I no longer run antivirus software on most of my Windows machines, but Bruce Schneier has just posted a persuasive argument in favor of it in most cases, despite the flaws. But persuasive or not, it doesn’t change my opinion or my stance on the systems I control. Antivirus is generally …
I don’t know why ISPs didn’t start doing this ten years ago. It was easily possible then, and there was certainly a need for it at that point too. I hope more of them pick it up in the future.
Haven’t seen one of these in a while, but this one appeared recently in my spam folder: Congratulations! You have won money in our annual e-mail lottery! You may find the gift check in attachment to this e-mail. Please print the check, to get your money prize. E-mail lottery. USA Mega Millions. [URL removed] The …
Continue reading ‘“You have won [RANDOM_AMOUNT] USD. Annual e-mail lottery.”’ »
Surprise! It’s 123456! Dark Helmet: So the combination is… one, two, three, four, five? That’s the stupidest combination I’ve ever heard in my life! The kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage! [next scene] President Skroob: Did it work? Where’s the king? Dark Helmet: It worked, sir. We have the combination. President …
Continue reading ‘“Most Common Hotmail Password Revealed!”’ »
Despite the title, the power grid itself is apparently not at risk — because its computers don’t run on Windows. Despite the (deservedly) bad reputation it has in security circles, there is something to be said for “security through obscurity.” 🙂
Spam purveyors are apparently having a very tough time getting past Bayesian filters. Check out this one: Subject: If you had a gold fish, you would ask for a bigger instrument. Would you like to have as many women so you could forget their names? All that would be possible if you added some extra …