THE TOP 12 SPAMMING COUNTRIES

What country would you pick as the number one spammer in the world? What I might have answered 4 years ago is not what I would have suspected now, but as with everything - change occurs.

[Credit: Sophoslabs]

"India has surpassed the U.S. and taken the lead as the greatest spam-sending country in the world. One out of every six junk messages that litter users' e-mail inboxes are coming from India, according to a new report from SophosLabs."

Read the article HERE.

IS IT SAFE? IS IT SAFE? IS IT SAFE?

(NOPE)

Sorry, I couldn't resist using a shortened line from the film "The Marathon Man" for the title. Of course, this question is in regard to cyber-security. So here is this morning's news - Ripped from the headlines.....

From the "Seattle Times":

"Police in the small (population 8,400) northwest Washington town of Burlington say hackers have transferred $400,000 out of a city account."

"Authorities say the transfers took place between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. The hacked Bank of America account has been frozen now."

Read the complete story on the Seattle Times website by going HERE and then review your own security and password strengths. Credits due: Associated Press and the Seattle Times.

'Nuff Said,
Brian

SICK-SICK-SICK

Boy, was I S-I-C-K last week (which accounts for the lack of Blog posts), hopefully it was a fairly light week, regarding viruses, but I worked Monday (on the basis I had bad allergies), then Tuesday (realizing by the afternoon my goose was cooked), and in bed until Sunday, so I'm playing catch up here.

BRIEFLY:

• Firefox released Version 16
• Firefox pulled Version 16 the next day
• Firefox later released Version 16 after patching critical bugs - some of which could allow someone to takeover your computer
• The U.S. Secretary of Defense said Thursday that "Future cyber attacks could rival 9-11, and cripple the U.S."
• The Conficker "Worm" is still be tracked, still infecting computers, with apparently no end in sight.

• In November AT&T will be sending out anti-piracy notices, initiating their new "SIX STRIKES AND YOUR OUT" policy.

'Nuff Said,
Brian

JUST BECAUSE AN ARTICLE SAYS MICROSOFT HAS RELEASED 20 PATCHES TODAY, INCLUDING A CRITICAL MS WORD PATCH,

DOESN'T MEAN YOU'LL GET THEM THAT DAY

I know this because I've gone through this before. I check the lower right corner of my taskbar where the icons are by the time, but I don't see any new updates waiting for me. Then, I go through Windows Update and after what seemed like 30 minutes, I get a message that there are no new critical updates for me.

What does this mean? It means that you may wake up Wednesday morning and find your PC rebooted after having Microsoft Updates installed - but don't hold your breath. The last one that came around didn't show up on my PC until Thursday night/Friday morning, and for some customers, not until the weekend.

Why is the Word flaw so critical? For many years I've discouraged users from using the view pane in Outlook because it's had a well known bug where if you're just previewing the message and the message has malicious code in it B-A-N-G, you're infected. What does Outlook have to do with Word? It uses word as it's default editor/viewer, so I'll be really happy if this does fix the problem which exists in Office versions 2003-2010.

The article did have a link to just the Word patch, which I just did, but you can wait for your updates to arrive soon in one package if you like, and I doubt I'll turn the viewing pane back on - after about 10 years I've figured out I really don't need it. The article can be found HERE.

'Nuff Said,
Brian

McAfee SECURITY SOFTWARE, SECURITY SUITES

[DON'T WORRY - VERY SHORT]

I suppose I was busy doing something other than reading a lot of Tech news in 2011, or maybe I read it and filed it in the "To Be Forgotten Bin", and you know that it's not my first, second, or third choice for Anti-Virus security, however an unrelated article caught my eye this morning about INTEL's announcement that they were going to lay-off at least 1000 McAfee employee's. Reading on, I read that Intel bought them in the first part of last year but due to the industry and economic decline they were forced to do this. I don't recall a time frame being mentioned - Heck! I don't even remember Intel buying them to begin with....

SUCKERS!

[A.K.A - IT DOESN'T PAY TO PLAY WITH SOME PROXIES]

SYMANTEC today said that "A black hat Russian operation has served malware to hundreds of thousands of users a year who thought they were signing up for a paid proxy service", in an article in the Security section of Cnet.com

"Anyone who thought they were downloading Web proxy software was instead installing a Trojan horse [complete with backdoors] tied to a Russian black hat operation."

"Once a computer is compromised, it connects to a remote server......."

You'll find that interesting article HERE.

'Nuff Said,
Brian

SKYPE WORM IS MULTIPLYING AND FINDING NEW PC'S TO BREED ON

Yeah, like you reading this, I'm as awake as I look as I read about yet another Monday morning blitz - this time a SKYPE "worm". As reported on Trend Micro's Security site (formerly security blog), you may find messages from people on your contact list which briefly asks:

“lol is this your new profile pic?" [which has a link for you to click on after the question mark]

Advice: Don't click on the link. It was reported in Europe over the night but comes in German and English versions. Read more about it on their site HERE. SKYPE, used for families to communicate from one side of the country, or world, to a another makes a fast way to spead this.

'Nuff Said,
Brian