[Geeks Are Sexy] Technology News

Spammers moving from email to the cellphone

By Mark O’Neill

This article in the New York Times really struck a raw nerve with me because it is a touchy subject in my life at the moment.     The article is about spammers who are moving their harassment from emails to the cellphone (or mobile phone if you are in Europe).    Never a day goes [...]

From Spam to Scams: 30 Years of Online Annoyances

By JR Raphael
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
Break out the bubbly: Spam is celebrating its 30th anniversary this weekend. And my oh my, three decades later, how the annoyances of the internet have changed.
Where it all started

The message considered the first unsolicited mass e-mail went out to unsuspecting inboxes on May 3, 1978. A marketing employee [...]

F-Secure’s Internet Security 2009 Beta

Anti-virus products from large corporations are becoming so bloated.  With features like backup solutions, password managers, anti-phishing, anti-spam, and application scanning firewalls, products that were intended to protect your system only tends to bog down it down.  Even as a security professional, I would prefer to not run an Anti-Virus product that is all-encompassing like [...]

A Dozen Gadgets to Add to your Arsenal

By JR Raphael
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
This month, we’re talking cool gadgets - the kind that are so cool that you’ve just gotta own them. We introduced our first 10 last week, and today we continue our list with a shocking little invention.

Half Million Microsoft Servers Hacked

By PatB
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
Gamers in China, desperate to get their powerups by cheating, are seeding Microsoft IIS servers with exploit code that will steal game logins. So far the mass attack has hit over 500k webservers.
Brian Krebs has the details, including some of the high-profile webservers affected at his blog on the Washington Post [...]

Creative Coding Catches Presidential Hopeful Off-Guard

By JR Raphael
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
Cross-site scripting is being blamed for a campaign trail hack.
Someone took advantage of weak security to redirect visitors from barackobama.com’s “Community Blogs” section to rival Hillary Clinton’s home page over the weekend.
A user identifying himself as “Mox” claims credit for the move on a post written just before midnight on Obama’s [...]

How to: Keep your e-correspondence private

By Mackenzie Morgan
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
We’re all a security-conscious bunch of folks, right? How much attention do you pay to your email account? You probably don’t give the password out to random strangers on the internet, I hope, but that’s not the only way someone could be snooping on or tampering with your email. In the [...]

Chocolate-covered phish, anyone?

In most aspects of IT, obscurity is not security.  But when it comes to passwords, obscurity is the only security.  You should create passwords that are difficult to guess, you shouldn’t use the same password for more than one service, and you definitely shouldn’t share your password with just anyone on the street who [...]

Imagineering the Spam

Everyone gets spam that makes them scratch their head and wonder, “just what was this spammer thinking?”  Well a cartoonist wondered the same thing and has started a website where he lampoons the worst of the spam with hilarious and clever daily drawings.

You can check out the rest at ASpamADay here.  Thanks to Neatorama for [...]

Upgrade Flash Now: 90 Percent of Windows Hosts Vulnerable

If you’re a heavy Internet surfer and are using Windows, you are probably vulnerable to a bunch of vulnerabilities in Adobe’s Flash Player without knowing it. A new version of the popular software has been just released, fixing seven flaws said to allow remote executable code to be run on a Windows system.
From Infoworld here:
Adobe has upgraded its Flash Player to fix seven vulnerabilities [...]