Michael Gracie

Graywolf’s SEO Blog notes that spammers are increasingly using political keywords in their message. Advise is being provided – if you can’t win an election (even with the unlimited internet usage rules now in effect), a candidate can at least make some money off the keywords.

***UPDATE***

I say just get a MySpace account – you get a virus instead of a supporter.

Proving once again that politicians love to grandstand….

Hot on the heels of the Veterans Administration’s laptop fiasco and the Commerce Department’s discovery that they’ve been very charitable with their machines, some politician decided to do something about it.

The result is a bill whose title has bark, but absolutely no bite. Just another initiative to study potential initiatives.

Same ol’ same ol’.

OK. You have people scamming their way into getting your phone records. HP executives dropping like flies for doing the same. It is big news nowadays, and it even has a (somewhat credible) definition now – “pretexting.”

What does our fine team of Washington legislators do? They call on wireless company executives to testify on the whole matter.

What in the hell is anyone going to learn from that (other than the fact that Congress loves grandstanding)?!

If you need some people to solve a problem, why not hire, hire away. Microsoft has a security problem, so they’ve hired yet another security guru, stealing Jimmy Kuo away from McAfee.

This is the second top character Redmond has picked off from a security firm. My question is, if Vista is already so secure, why do they need all these people now?

People have noticed more spam coming into their .Mac email accounts, and now a solution presents itself.

All 16 people using an “@mac.com” email address (for a hundred bucks a year) can now feel much less aggravated, particularly when watching their friends free email accounts’ spam buckets fill up like mad.

According to the Privacy Rights Clearing house, the last two years has brought data breaches nearing 100 million. Now, that is individual records included in the number, but who’s counting?

When the number will crack 100 million is anyones guess, but given the fact organizations that practically give their data away get little more than slaps on the hand, I’d probably hold my breath until it does.

The popular cPanel virtual server software has fallen prey to a previously unknown vulnerability, resulting in hundreds of hijacked magic crystal, “get-a-new-girlfriend now” ebook, and political blog sites.

Is this such a bad thing?

Of course, the infections the hackers distributed are only useful in Internet Explorer (as if that’s news).

According to Symantec, home PCs are the new target for hackers. It’s a bold statement, complete with statistics, so it must be true. Hackers are going after grandma, because all those pictures of the backyard flowerbed are worth big bucks in the blackmarket.

My take – Symantec must have saturated the business security market by now (or at least someone has), so they are going after all the everyday folk who view their Pentium IIIs as just another appliance in the house.

Or maybe the “hidden cost of security freeware” is that people are actually using it?

***UPDATE***

Since virus writers are playing the “insecurity by obscurity” angle, maybe all that niche freeware is just doing a better job marketing, hence the need for scare tactics.

Cross-site scripting attacks are hitting major websites, including MySpace, YouTube, and even venerable oldies like MSN, Dell, and Apple.

XSS attacks were long a tool of cute little script kiddies who malformed sites for the joy of their cute little friends. As a result, some still question how big the threat really is.

Just when you get complacent, someone is going to figure out how to make money from a vulnerability. Then shit hits the fan, and a bunch of overpriced consultants run in to save the day while someone’s multi-million a year ecommerce site flails, frames displaying Winnie-the-Pooh notwithstanding.

XSS, welcome to the corporate world.

Troy Angrignon is having increasing difficulties managing his spam. According to Troy, even with the use of Gmail his inbox is filling up at a rate of one every nine minutes. Of course, spam seems to come in bundles, and he probably checked at an optimum time of day, but who the hell cares.

Meanwhile, others believe email is going to take a hit in the business world. That probably wouldn’t be such a bad thing – not only is spam becoming a bigger percentage of business email, but people tend to use email to carry on entire conversations over the course of the day. It’s damn aggravating, and I think quite unproductive.

Someone use the fricken phone, will ya?