Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Ahnlab gets major ASP deal in China. Ahnlab has acquired a major stepping-stone into the Chinese domestic market, according to an article published by the Korea Herald, by signing a contract with Sina.com, China’s monolithic Internet portal/media company. Ahnlab will provide three security solutions: online vaccine, real-time firewall and keyboard protection, on an application service…

Narrowband blues, 2004 predictions, VeriSign scuttles Symantec, Dloader/Xombie It’s been a busy few days as 2004 starts to get into full swing. VB has a roundup of the weekend’s virus news: Tech news website Internet News is running an article on Microsoft’s Narrowband Security Hurdle , in which Christopher Budd, security program manager with Microsoft’s…

AMD and Intel prep technology to prevent buffer overflows at the hardware level. IT news site Silicon.com has published an article about hardware security in CPUs to prevent buffer overflows. The article reports that AMD Athalon 64 chips already contain the necessary circuitry, which won’t be activated until Microsoft releases Service Pack 2 for Windows…

Anti-spam legislation in place. While the ‘CAN-SPAM Act’ is expected to have been signed into US law by 1 January 2004, December 2003 saw the introduction of anti-spam legislation in the UK. Both sets of legislation have been criticised by members of the anti-spam community for making life easy for spammers – indeed, prolific spammer…

Calculating the average cost of a virus attack – estimates or guesstimates? This month has seen a flurry of the traditional end-of-year predictions for the security challenges in the year ahead, along with a number of reports estimating the cost of virus attacks to businesses in 2003. However, it is difficult (if not impossible) to…

Computer security experts prepare to become special constables. A set of proposals for tackling computer crime has been published by UK Parliamentary lobby group EURIM and the Institute for Public Policy Research. Among other proposals, the paper recommends the introduction of frameworks to facilitate co-operation between industry and law enforcement. One of the ideas put…

IronPort Systems to purchase SpamCop According to the IDG News Service, email security hardware manufacturer IronPort Systems Inc. is set to announce its purchase of anti-spam company and spam blacklister SpamCop . Indications are that the ‘blacklist’ will continue to be available free of charge to the public after the purchase. See http://www.ironport.com/ . Posted…

Increase in spam in lead up to holiday season. A recent study carried out by Corvigo , suggests that the volume of spam in our inboxes showed a marked increase over the lead up to the holiday season. The three-month study showed a 64 per cent rise in the volume of spam since September Whether…

Virus Bulletin calls for all speakers papers. full article Posted on 05 January 2004 by Virus Bulletin

Is BitDefender really staffed by Romanian vampire hackers…? A recent report by the Associated Press claims that ‘computer-savvy Romanians are fast emerging as a bold menace in the shadowy world of cybercrime’, citing as part of its evidence the fact that more than 60 Romanians have been arrested in recent international operations concerning crime of…