Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Mortgage spam rockets
Spammers take note of US interest rate cuts. Mortgage spam saw a significant increase last month in conjunction with the interest rate cuts announced by the US Federal Reserve. According to researchers at Commtouch , mortgage spam rose to 10% of all spam as spammers took note of the fact that millions of US mortgages…
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All in the name
Grisoft becomes AVG. Last month, Czech firm Grisoft , developer of widely used anti-malware product AVG , changed its corporate name to AVG Technologies CZ, s.r.o. Having operated under the Grisoft name for nearly 17 years the company will now go under the same name as its popular product. Similar moves have been made in…
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Magic lanterns shine at terrorists
Virus Bulletin finds 40% of users think governments should write viruses to bug terrorists. In a survey of visitors to the Virus Bulletin website, 40% of computer users said they thought it was a good idea for governments to write viruses to bug terrorists – however, security professionals disagree. It is an idea that surfaces…
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$3.2 billion lost in phishing attacks in 2007
Gartner survey reveals US losses to phishing gangs. Analyst firm Gartner has estimated that $3.2 billion was lost by 3.6 million US computer users in phishing attacks over the 12 months ending in August 2007. Gartner arrived at the figures after surveying more than 4,500 US adult computer users. The survey found that, of those…
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Zero-day exploit for Japanese word processor Ichitaro
Trend Micro notes increase in regionally targeted attacks as trojan becomes latest to exploit a Ichitaro flaw. A trojan has been found to be exploiting a buffer overflow vulnerability in popular Japanese word processing package Ichitaro . According to analysts at Trend Micro a backdoor trojan is installed when a malicious .JTD file is opened…
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Survey finds 75% lose trust in data-loss firms
Security breaches seriously undermining public respect. A survey carried out jointly by security company Check Point and research firm YouGov has found public reaction to data security breaches is overwhelmingly negative. 75% of respondents to the survey said they would not trust a firm that had suffered a data theft or leakage, while 79% would…
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VB100 update
Several issues resulting from recent Windows 2000 test cleared up. After a busy and drama-filled VB100 month, several issues arising from the test have been subject to further investigation. CA Anti-Virus , the home edition of CA ‘s product, was recorded missing some 20 samples from the WildList collection, although the corporate version, eTrust ,…
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Four IE bugs fixed by Patch Tuesday release
Seven updates, three critical in monthly security update. Microsoft has released its monthly ‘Patch Tuesday’ security bulletin, featuring seven updates of which three are marked ‘critical’ and cover flaws which could allow remote execution of code if exploited on vulnerable systems. The critical issues are with DirectX , Windows Media Format and Internet Explorer ,…
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Cyber attackers breach defences at secret US labs
Spearphishing and trojans penetrate research lab security. At least one major US science lab, used to handle highly classified government and military material, has had its networks penetrated by hackers, using targeted email campaigns to sneak custom trojans onto systems and extract data. While no information has emerged on the source of the attacks, rumours…
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Grisoft acquires Exploit Prevention Labs
AVG to incorporate LinkScanner in further consolidation of security offerings. Grisoft , developer of the AVG security product whose free version is widely deployed on home-user desktops, has announced the acquisition of Exploit Prevention Labs , a small firm whose headline product LinkScanner focuses on detecting exploit attempts in web pages before they are visited.…
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