Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

AOL employee arrested. An AOL employee has been arrested and charged with selling the company’s customer email list to spammers. 24-year-old AOL engineer Jason Smathers is accused of stealing at least 92 million screen names from AOL’s database and selling the information to an associate, 21-year-old email marketer Sean Dunaway. Dunaway, who has also been…

The six major ISPs of the Anti-Spam Technical Alliance say spam cannot be stopped unless they take action. Six major Internet Service Providers have put forward a joint proposal aimed at reducing spam and say that spam cannot be stopped unless they take responsibility for the problem. Under the guise of the Anti-Spam Technical Alliance,…

Rumours abound. NAI CEO denies them. Tech news website CRN reports that AV vendor Network Associates is up for sale, and that Microsoft is the likely lucky new owner. Although no announcement has been made by the Network Associates (NAI) – which recently sold its Sniffer technologies and revealed plans to rebrand as McAfee Associates…

On 12 June 2004 Marek Sell, creator of the Polish MkS_Vir anti-virus, died. Aleksander Czarnowksi looks back. I met Marek somewhere around 1990, two years after he released the first public version of MkS_Vir. There are very few people in the AV industry who have stayed around for so long. If you remember the days…

Mobile providers clamour to become the first to offer AV protection for mobile phones. Following the appearance of SymbOS/Cabir.A, the first virus capable of spreading via mobile phone, mobile providers have been clamouring to become the first to offer anti-virus protection for mobile phones. South Korean SK Telecom announced the development, in cooperation with AhnLab,…

Gis’ a job! Name: Sven Jaschan. Age: 18. Previous work experience: creating and distributing Internet worm(s). The lawyer representing Sven Jaschan, self-confessed author of the Sasser worm, claims that his client is ‘desperately’ seeking a trainee position in the computer industry. Jaschan told Stern magazine that he is worried about having to pay damages to…

Not forgotten… Microsoft is still on track to offer its own anti-virus product, according to the chief of its security business unit. It has been a year since Microsoft announced the acquisition of anti-virus technology from Romanian AV manufacturer GeCAD Software – and, since then, all has gone rather quiet on the Microsoft AV front.…

A ‘Do Not Spam’ list could actually increase spam levels, says FTC. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has told Congress that a national ‘Do Not Spam’ registry is not appropriate at present – stating that, rather than addressing the problem of spam, such a registry could potentially increase levels of spam and could not be…

First mobile phone worm discovered. The first worm to be capable of spreading via mobile phones has been discovered. The initial announcement of the proof-of-concept worm was made by Kaspersky Labs yesterday (14 June). EPOC/Cabir replicates on the EPOC-based Nokia Series 60 phones, although it is not currently known whether other EPOC-based devices are also…

Microsoft throws its weight around against spammers Microsoft has filed eight new lawsuits against spammers. All of the suits allege spoofing and falsifying of domain names. While most of the suits target unnamed defendants, two target specific entities: Florida company PinPoint Media, and prolific spammer John Hites, who is listed on Spamhaus’s Register of Known…