Michael Gracie 

I know a lot of stock brokers. The good ones are excellent sales people, but their skill sets usually end there. They generally have rudimentary knowledge of fundamental and/or technical analysis, money management principles, and even basic economics. I don’t know if they forgot all that subject matter right after they passed the Series 7 [...]

Oxford Analytica has a brief on identify theft published over at Forbes.com. The reason I say “hit the big time” is because OA is quoting some monsterous incident numbers in Hooked On Phishing. Accordingly, they say that the FTC reported roughly 27.3 million cases of identify theft over the last five years – nearly one-tenth [...]

I had the chance to stop by the US Bankruptcy Court yesterday, to observe the latest in the OptInRealBig and Scott Richter bankruptcy cases. It was less than a packed courtroom, with roughly 15 people there including Judge Tallman and myself. Mr. Richter had no huge entourage – it was just he, two lawyers, his [...]

Hacking websites used to be child’s play. Real hackers (you know, the folks who could spin a Defense Department database from a Pentium I laptop, bouncing packets off the moon via a HeathKit box, coding in C, while blindfolded) called them script kiddies. People don’t seem to understand that the child aspires to be like [...]

Larry Seltzer assembled this op-ed over at eWeek, which cuts to the core of some Yahoo! abuse management troubles. It seems that Yahoo! is not exactly quick to the punch when shady (or downright illegal) sites are brought up on the Yahoo!/Inktomi network. In addition, Yahoo! makes it pretty difficult to report abuse cases, particularly [...]

Over at Spamroll, no artifice of electronic trickery is safe from scrutiny. With that in mind, one must follow the goings on with search engine spam (see Is Google Becoming A Central Theme in Spam Wars? and Blogger gaming search engines, from the inside out for starters). So I was surprised to notice the other [...]

We’ve seen it before, and we’ll see it again – Elliot Spitzer suing evil-doers. Yes, Elliot is at it again, this time suing spyware vendor Intermix for infecting millions of computers with redirect code, silly toolbars that do nothing, and tons of popups. Best guess is more than 3.7 installs in New York alone. Boy [...]

Two new anti-spyware companies have recently hit the pavement. SurfControl, of policy management and filtering software note, announced its new SurfControl Enterprise Threat Shield, which will be sold to businesses. In a separate announcement, Tenebril, makers of the SpyCatcher desktop app, announced a $6.5 million round led by Sierra Ventures, and that security industry veteran [...]

ZoneAlarm Security Suite’s latest update caused a few problems with some users. According to this report, the change caused the anti-spam filter to turn on by default. Some temporarily missed mail was the only issue, and the above article points out the easy fix, which entails opening ZoneAlarm’s control panel and turning the junk e-mail [...]

I have always been a little cautious with my Linux install, not because I don’t trust it, but because I don’t trust those on the outside who might decide to tool with it for less than honorable reasons. So it is nice to see that someone is paying attention to Linux users. While the Vexira [...]