Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Sermon software spyware, says Symantec. Popular software used by Church of England clergy has been mislabelled as spyware by Symantec ‘s Norton software. The software, called ‘ Visual Liturgy ‘, is used by vicars for planning sermons and services, but after an update in early July they found a file in the package being flagged…

Single botnet responsible for 8 million phishing emails. A single botnet has unleashed over 8 million phishing emails on UK targets over the last few days, according to mail security firm BlackSpider . The mails, sent from a zombie net of up to 20,000 machines, target users of UK online banks NatWest and Royal Bank…

Another piece of malware for MS Powershell. Another piece of malware for Microsoft ‘s Powershell is making the news. The script virus exploits the new command shell, formerly known as Monad and originally planned to be part of the Vista release. Cibyz is described as ‘experimental’ and ‘proof of concept’, which can usually be taken…

Supermarket sweep. In a plot mirroring the Mike Judge comedy Office Space , a team of supermarket employees in Manama created trojan software to tweak company databases and steal cash, according to Bahrain sources. While two confederates are being held, Interpol is apparently assisting in the search for the original mastermind behind the scheme. Read…

Student launched DDoS attacks ‘just for fun’. A Hanoi student who used the forums he ran to recruit and control a botnet has been arrested. The as-yet-unnamed youth used the botnet to launch DDoS attacks on local websites, apparently ‘just for fun’. The youth was tracked down by Vietnamese e-security police unit ‘C15’, in collaboration…

Are Macs safer than Windows PCs? Oh yes they are… Oh no they’re not.. etc. Spokespeople for various AV companies continue to add to the ‘are Macs safer?’ debate kicked off last month by Sophos ‘s Graham Cluley (see his arguments in this month’s issue of VB ). Many industry players have highlighted the figures…

Security issues with VoIP technology revealed at Black Hat USA. Security issues with VoIP technology, allowing hackers to access corporate services and sell them on, as well as potentially far worse holes, are emerging from the Black Hat conference running in Las Vegas this week. Read the analysis at BusinessWeek online . Posted on 03…

Shock figure drawn from dubious source. The BBC online news website has published an article under the headline ‘More than 95% of e-mail is “junk”‘. The report, which was linked to from the BBC News front page on 27 July, draws together various statistics from Return Path , IronPort and Sophos , concentrating on the…

Finnish AV firm shows strong performance. F-Secure ‘s latest financial announcement reports a 35% growth in revenues, and an 88% growth in operating profits. The success is put down to doing well in the ISP market, and the Finnish company’s recent deal with UK-based Barclays Bank , supplying the F-Secure product to Barclays ‘ online…

Beware fake international police organizations… Practitioners of ur-phish, the 419 scam, have set up a doctored mirror of Interpol’s website, as a ruse to ease victims’ worries over the legality of handing their bank details over to strangers offering vast sums of cash in return. Read more at The Register : http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/31/scammers_create_interpol_mirror . Interpol has…