Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Microsoft to replace OneCare with free AV product
OneCare retirement announced, new product will be lighter on systems and pockets. Microsoft has announced plans to put an end to its home-user security product Live OneCare , and to replace it with a simpler, free anti-malware product aimed at reducing numbers of unprotected Windows PCs. The end date for OneCare sales has been set…
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ICANN pulls plug on registrar favoured by cyber crooks
After a week’s stay of execution, ICANN decides EstDomains will be terminated. ICANN, the organization responsible for managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses, has announced it will pull the plug on Estonian domain registrar EstDomains – long known to be favoured by cybercriminals for their domain registrations – on 24 November. In…
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Disconnection of dubious provider sees spam levels plummet
Web-hosting firm believed to be responsible for 75% of spam. Anti-spam researchers across the world reported a significant drop in the volume of spam seen after web-hosting firm McColo was taken offline on Tuesday. The San Jose, California-based provider is believed to have hosted many botnet control centres that controlled zombies around the world and…
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Two updates in Microsoft’s November’s patch release
Just two updates released by Microsoft this month: one rated critical, one important. Microsoft has issued two updates in the November round of its monthly patch release cycle, one of them rated ‘critical’. The critical update addresses vulnerabilities in Microsoft XML Core Services which could be exploited to create a web page that would cause…
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Riders on a Storm
Researchers hijack botnet – and find spam success rates lower than previously believed. Less than 1 in 12 million spam emails sent through the infamous Storm botnet led to a purchase attempt, according to researchers at the University of California in San Diego and Berkeley – a much lower spam success rate than previously estimated.…
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Microsoft issues emergency patch
Out-of-cycle update fixes serious, wormable flaw. Microsoft has issued an emergency update to cover a serious vulnerability in the Windows Server service, breaking its usual monthly ‘Patch Tuesday’ cycle of security fixes. The flaw was considered serious enough to merit an urgent patch release, although Microsoft will only confirm having seen the usual ‘limited, targeted’…
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Sarkozy bank account raided by cybercrooks
Hackers steal from French president – phish suspected. French president Nicolas Sarkozy has had his funds stolen from his bank account, apparently after a phishing email tricked him into handing over access codes, according to reports. The raid only lifted ‘small amounts’ from the account, and due to the widespread fame Sarkozy has picked up…
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US ISPs urged to snoop on traffic
NY Attorny General promotes deep packet inspection to AOL. ISPs in the US are coming under increasing pressure to impose deep probing of all their customers’ traffic, with the Attorney General of New York passing details of one system of deep packet inspection to major provider AOL . While the government’s intentions are to control…
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McAfee false positive flags Vista component
Innocent file labelled trojan. McAfee has updated one of its detections after a faulty update led to an integral component of the Windows Vista operating system being falsely flagged as a trojan horse. The innocent file, the Windows console input method editor executable conime.exe , was alerted on as a password-stealing trojan for online gaming…
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Security dominates software sales charts
AV, IS and anti-spyware products represent nine of last month’s top 20 bestsellers. Sales of security products remain very strong despite economic conditions, according to market research organisation NPD , whose sales figures for September show nine of the top 20 selling products were security-related. The rest of the chart is made up of games…
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