Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Latest Patch Tuesday update released
Microsoft announces five ‘critical’ vulnerabilities need fixing. Microsoft has issued its monthly ‘Patch Tuesday’ security bulletin, with five ‘critical’ and three ‘important’ patches made available. The more serious flaws are vulnerabilities in MS Project and the scripting engines for VBScript and JScript , problems with ActiveX and GDI , and the usual cumulative update fixing…
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‘Kraken’ monster botnet causing controversy
As latest botnet scare debated, Storm keeps on blowing. Recent reports of a massive botnet, apparently sneaking its trojans past security software and far outnumbering better-known infections such as ‘Storm’, have been dismissed as hype by some analysts but firmly upheld by the researchers who first alerted on the threat. The botnet has been dubbed…
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HP ships infected USB keys
Autorun worms found on batch of server setup devices. A batch of USB thumb drives containing software intended to assist in the setup of servers have been found to contain some nasty extras, in the shape of worms using the autorun feature to infect systems connected to the removable devices. The drives were shipped to…
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Google Groups and Blogspot used to serve malware
Company finds own IP address to be serving most malware. Malware writers have created thousands of Google Groups with the sole purpose of serving malware, Sunbelt reports . On the Groups pages, visitors are shown several images with explicit pornography, as well as what looks like an embedded YouTube video. However, when clicking on the…
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Users of online banking ‘should have adequate protection’
New UK banking code says customers who keep their PCs secure will not be responsible for losses due to online theft. A new banking code launched earlier this week by the British’ Bankers Association (BBA) states that customers who ‘use up-to-date anti-virus and anti-spyware software and a personal firewall’ cannot be held liable for losses…
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Less than 30 per cent of smartphone users have AV installed
Experts disagree on the need for specialist mobile AV protection. In a poll only 19% of visitors to the VB website said they had anti-malware protection on their mobile phone. While 33% of respondents said they did not have a smartphone (and thus would not be susceptible to malware threats), more than 70% of smartphone…
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Average spam message size at record low
No decrease of bandwidth usage as number of spam messages keeps increasing. The average size of spam messages has decreased to a record low of just over 2KB, security company Marshal reports . The average size of spam messages was almost 11KB early in 2007, when spammers hid the content of their messages in images…
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April Storm
April Fools’ Day emails contain new variant of infamous worm. Security researchers report a new wave of spam emails being sent out. The emails, which use subject lines such as ‘Gotcha! April Fool!’ or ‘Surprise! The joke’s on you.’, contain a small piece of text, an image as well as a link to an IP-based…
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Almost 90% of Americans feel safe online
Users’ confidence does not match up with percentage of properly protected users. Research by StopBadware.org shows that 88% of Americans say they feel safe online, despite the current threats of phishing, spyware and other kinds of badware. Of survey participants who were under 30 – the generation that grew up with computers and the Internet…
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From Simple Mail to Hypertext
HTTP and FTP take over from SMTP as common malware spreading methods. A report from F-Secure has highlighted the recent shift in malware spreading methods from email to web-based methods. For many years, malware authors’ preferred method of spreading their wares was to send out masses of emails that contained a piece of malware as…
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