Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

The October issue of Virus Bulletin is now available for subscribers to download. The October 2006 issue of Virus Bulletin is now available for subscribers to browse online or download in PDF format. Just a few of the things this month’s issue has in store are: DDoS: the rise from obscurity : Danny McPherson affirms…

September’s goings on in the AV industry. The top news stories of September were undoubtedly those concerning the VML vulnerability in Microsoft ‘s Internet Explorer . Not only was an unofficial patch for the vulnerability released by the Zeroday Emergency Response Team (ZERT), but Microsoft also saw fit to break its ‘Patch Tuesday’ cycle in…

Six men charged with masterminding a phishing operation. Six US men have been indicted on charges of masterminding a phishing operation. According to the indictment, the six men used email-harvesting software to obtain AOL members’ details from the Internet. Then, between 2004 and earlier this year, the group bombarded the AOL members with messages that…

Weaselboy conviction upheld. The man who is the UK’s biggest – and possibly nastiest – spammer has failed in his appeal to overturn two of his convictions. Back in November 2005 a court found the 24-year-old ‘weaselboy’ (real name Peter Francis-Macrae) guilty of a catalogue of offences, including fraudulent trading, concealing criminal property, threatening to…

Relative safety may lead to unsafe practices. Symantec has issued a warning to Apple Macintosh users that they are still at risk from online threats, despite the relative scarcity of malware affecting the platform. In an interview with MacWorld , a spokesman for the security firm warned that the feeling of security engendered by the…

PowerPoint problem tops off busy month for MS. Yet another vulnerability has been revealed in a Microsoft product, this time in the PowerPoint slideshow software. The problem is reportedly already being exploited in the wild by several dropper trojans. The vulnerability is described by Secunia as ‘extremely critical’. Microsoft has been criticised, by McAfee among…

Team of six face jail in Connecticut. A group of six men have been charged with phishing by a grand jury in Connecticut. The men allegedly harvested email addresses and spammed their victims with phishing emails and malware-infected ecards. As well as normal phishing and data-stealing techniques, the gang also apparently used malware to slow…

Analyst firm rates industry heavyweights. Analyst firm Forrester has released a report on ‘Client Security Suites’, naming McAfee as the leading brand in the field. Symantec and Sophos are both described as ‘viable alternatives’, but lack some features, including network access control and administration tools, needed to keep up with McAfee ‘s comprehensive offerings, which…

VML fix released only a week after flaw exploited. Microsoft has released a patch for the widely publicised and much exploited security hole in its Internet Explorer browser, a little over a week after the flaw was brought to its attention by security researchers, the press and Windows users. The VML vulnerability has been causing…

Certificates sign of danger, says researcher. Website certification system Truste has been hit by a report claiming that sites bearing its certificates are more than twice as likely to be unsafe than uncertified ones. The study compares a list of sites issued with the TRUSTe certificate with data from McAfee ‘s Site Advisor service, which…