We know that a major contributor to rising spam levels is botnets - networks of compromised computers. According to industry findings, however, only a handful of botnets were responsible for the majority of spam sent in February. Six botnets spewed out 85 percent of all spam last month, the first time so few botnets were found to be responsible for so much spam, a Marshal report says.
Google may pledge to do no evil, but the same is not true of the World Wide Web. According to the search giant, web browsing and online searches are growing more risky.
In a new technical report available this month, Google outlines the frequency of drive-by downloads on the Internet. A few of the interesting points in the analysis, which is currently under peer review, include the following:
- More than 3 million unique URLs on more than 180,000 sites automatically install malware on visitors PCs.
If you follow security news, you're bound to have seen reports the past weeks on the recent sub-sea cable breakages that disrupted Internet services in South Asia and the Middle East.
Wondering exactly how the Web is connected together around the world? Take a look at how we cable the seas to stay connected in a new article in our Spyware Education Center.
Identity theft is a big business. This was confirmed by the U.S. Federal Trade Commissions annual report, Consumer Fraud and Identity Theft Complaint Data, which shows fraud complaints that consumers have filed with the agency over the past year. Again this year, identity theft tops the list of all fraud complaints. In fact, the FTC received 258,427 complaints related to identity theft - 32 percent of the total complaints! Consumers reported fraud losses totally over $1.2 billion.
For those of you who are old enough to remember Roseanne Roseannadanna on Saturday Night Live, "My father always used to say, it's always something. If it's not one thing, it's another"
Microsoft is pushing their weight around. We've got Ad-Aware customers contacting us left and right because Microsoft is telling them to uninstall their Ad-Aware software in order to run Windows Live OneCare "security software" (the quotation marks are mine).
Today, February 12, is Safer Internet Day in many countries throughout Europe. In connection with that, Eurostat, an office of the European Communities, has released stats on Internet activities.
Results from surveys of households and individuals in the European Union show that:
- One person in eight avoids e-shopping because of security concerns.
Who's responsible for those unwanted messages flooding our inboxes? According to a recent report, there has been a considerable shift in where spam originates from; European spam networks are now said to be pumping out more unsolicited messages than those in the U.S.
Last week, along with other groups, security companies, and government agencies combating spyware and malware, members of the Lavasoft team attended the Anti-Spyware Coalition Public Workshop in Washington, DC.
Almost daily now we come across a website that was obviously set up to take advantage of the unfortunate soul that lands on their page.
Here's an example of a page that is serving up a triple threat! Click on the image for a larger view.
First, they lure you in through the title "Lavasoft adware". Our product is Ad-Aware...not adware. That's the stuff we're fighting. There is also a screenshot of the Ad-Aware user interface. The text on the page is basic information that doesn't serve a purpose at all.
For those interested in learning more about the anatomy of todays phishing scams, Net-Security.org has an interview with two security researchers who are speaking out about the phishing underground.
From the article:
"What started as a simple examination of phishing sites, turned into an extraordinary view of the ecosystem that supports the phishing effort that plagues modern day financial institutions and their customers."
What is public and private data when it comes to our online lives? How much information should your search engine be able to record about you?
Following a recent European Parliament hearing on online data protection, specific questions on Internet Protocol (IP) addresses have been raised.
According to the head of the E.U.'s group of data privacy regulators, IP addresses should be regarded as personal information, a move which would have consequences for how some search engines record data.
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