Michael Gracie 

Viral attacks in the UK dropped slightly in the latest month, but no matter. Phishing attacks continue to soar, along with spam volumes. Furthermore, the time between virus releases and patch availability is still narrow, making it difficult to defend against viruses without additional upfront mail filters checking things out as well.

I have to wonder if John Mitchell and Dan Boneh’s password hash mechanism (and its potential offshoots) will be able to protect against nasty plugins such as this. Safersurf announced that the EliteBar (another in a long line of spyware-based browser toolbars) not only tracks your surfing habits, but can also send your credit card [...]

A couple of faculty members from Stanford University have developed a new tool in the war against phishing that could become very sticky. Instead of sending passwords input into web pages across the net in plain sight, John Mitchell and Dan Boneh have developed a hashing methodology which scrambles the passwords in line with the [...]

New Zealand has a bill on the platter that would hit local spammers with extremely stiff fines. If busted while sending spam from the homeland, spamming companies would face fines up to $500,000, and individuals could get hit for up to $200,000. Unfortunately, New Zealand can’t do much to stop spam emanating from other countries. [...]

Techdirt just noted that one of the AOL subscribers to its Techdirt Wireless newsletter has been reporting the email as spam, and that AOL is now giving them a hard time. Techdirt is being forced to remove all AOL subscribers to the email, in order to keep AOL off their backs, and despite having a [...]

Despite the fact that Pew says internet users are approaching the web with a bit more caution, I’ll reiterate that I view most surveys with some skepticism. Case in point – spyware reporting activity is soaring. The flip side of this coin could be that monitoring of spyware “calling home” activity is a nascent observation, [...]

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is now warning banks to beware of spyware. Of course, Reuters just had to reach by comparing spyware data theft to the CardSystems data theft, which just keeps getting bigger. Lets first set the record straight by saying that a data intermediary storing information in reckless disregard of its customers [...]

I would say it is pretty tough to speculate on the whys regarding a big Russian spammer being found murdered in his apartment, and frankly, I don’t want to bother speculating. That is left up to the news. But Vardan Kushnir, head of the Center for American English, the New York English Centre and the [...]

The FTC has many some small headway in the fight against pornographic spam by imposing some hefty fines on a group of website operators and their affiliates. Unfortunately, I have to call it “small headway” because the group was limited to four payees, and they coughed up roughly $1.2 million. Included were BangBros.com Inc. of [...]

Spyware, adware, and malware sneak onto your Windows computer and pump some faraway server full of information about what you are doing online. These programs bury themselves in your registries, and now Zone Labs thinks it’s cracked the problem. The next release of the software is supposed to include kernel level firewalling which monitors any [...]