Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Strong sales for security products in June. A hefty seven of the top 10 software products sold over the counter in June were security-related, according to sales tracking organisation NPD . Symantec ‘s Norton range was heavily represented in the list. The only non-security-related software to muscle its way onto the list were MS Office…

Norton and VirusScan afflicted. Symantec has issued details of a minor bug in its Norton AV software – a recent update left some users seeing confusing messages claiming the products no longer supported repairing. Meanwhile McAfee , already taking flak for its confused attitude to open-source in its 20MB ‘Sage’ pdf, is getting early reports…

The August issue of Virus Bulletin is now available for subscribers to download. The August 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: The great Mac debate : Graham Cluley explains why…

Anti-phishing recommendations for ISPs and mailbox providers. A new set of best practices to combat phishing has been released by the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) and Messaging Anti-Abuse Group (MAAWG), to help ISPs and mailbox providers better police their infrastructures and filter the traffic traversing their networks. The two industry groups joined forces to develop…

Mergers in the anti-spam market. Anti-spam and messaging security company CipherTrust announced last month that it is to be acquired by Secure Computing . CipherTrust – which currently has an approximately 20% market share in the messaging security market – will be purchased by Secure Computing for a total of $273.6m in cash and stock.…

New anti-spam laws prepared and old ones revisited. One of the world’s top spam-sending hot spots is currently preparing for the launch of its first anti-spam laws. Together with the rest of China, the Chinese territory of Hong Kong has been named in a number of recent reports (e.g. Sophos , Commtouch and Spamhaus )…

Setting the record straight. In VB’s June 2006 comparative review it was reported that the Norman product behaved badly, with repeated crashes on dealing with infected or previously disinfected files. VB would like to note that since then, neither Norman’s developers nor VB’s new resident product tester have been able to reproduce the bad behaviour…

Arming sys admins with all they need to know to write a rootkit… Imaginatively named magazine for Linux users Linux Magazine has published an article entitled ‘How to write a rootkit’. The piece is the cover story for the August issue of the magazine. According to the magazine’s website the aim of the article is…

Database thief charged. A US man has been charged with stealing a database of US physicians with the intention of selling it on to spammers. Forty-six-year-old William Bailey, Jr is alleged to have downloaded the contact details of 80,000 members of a database maintained by the American College of Physicians (ACP) with the intention of…

Three members of virus-writing gang held. Three members of a malware-writing group were arrested last month following investigations in Finland and the UK. The three men – a 63-year-old Englishman, a 28-year-old Scotsman and a 19-year-old from Finland – who are believed to be members of the malware-writing group m00p, were arrested on suspicion of…