Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Phishers pose as online contacts to push bogus shopping sites. A major spam campaign is bombarding inboxes with mails masquerading as messages from conacts on web social and content-sharing site MySpace . The mails pretend to come from someone linked to the victims via the network, spoofing the MySpace style as well as sender info,…

Proof-of-concept exploit shows further bug in slideshow software Microsoft has issued an alert over a new potential zero-day exploit in its PowerPoint presentation software. The exploit is only a proof of concept and is as yet not thought to be in use by attackers. The new bug comes just days after the monthly Patch Tuesday…

Spam campaign tries to hook users with new browser version. A spam campaign has been spotted using the latest version of Microsoft ‘s web browser, Internet Explorer 7 , as bait. The spammed mails contain spoofed sender information trying to fool recipients into believing they originate from Microsoft tech support, and offer free downloads of…

Diners ‘rewarded’ with infected music players Japanese customers of global burger giant MacDonald’s have been warned that 10,000 MP3 players handed out by the firm as part of a promotion are infected with a data-stealing worm. The USB-sticks given out to burger buyers were laden with free tunes, but also harboured malware labelled QQPass by…

As another VB conference comes to a close, dates for next year’s conference are revealed. VB2006, which took place in Montréal last week has been declared a resounding success by the conference organisers. The conference drew to a close on Friday 13th October after three packed days of presentations, panel discussions, meetings, birds of a…

CEO leaves, president fired over financial problems. Investigations into irregularities in McAfee ‘s finances have led to the resignation of the company CEO and board chairman George Samenuk, and the sacking of president Kevin Weiss. The changes at the top come after a lengthy investigation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) into stock…

Police notify 2,300 their details have been stolen. London’s Metropolitan Police has contacted over 2,300 computer users to inform them that their details have been found on a server storing data collected by Haxdoor trojans. Police investigating online theft discovered a vast cache of data stored on the server, and the Met emailed the UK-based…

Anti-spam system at risk of losing identity. The recent case in which a US court found anti-spam organisation Spamhaus guilty of mislabelling a company as spammers may take a dramatic new twist, as fears emerge that appeals to the ruling may result in the withdrawal of the spamhaus.org domain by domain management organisation Internet Corporation…

BitDefender defends reputation, three more VB100% awards granted. Since the publication of the recent VB100% results, several of the files from the clean test set causing false positives from various vendors have been made available for deeper analysis. As a result, some changes are required to the cleanset, and to the results of the VB100%.…

EU court rejects trademark dispute. Hormel Foods , maker of the SPAM pressed meat product, has lost a case brought before the European ‘Office for Harmonization of Internal Markets’ (OHIM), aimed at protecting its trademark of the word SPAM. A second appeal to an application first brought almost two years ago has been rejected by…