The old pump-and-dump spam scam, which at one point accounted for half of all unsolicited email, has plummeted to just five per cent this month, according to email security firm Marshal.

Pump-and-dump spam levels have averaged around 30 per cent but in the last four weeks of the quarter, however, the Marshal Threat Research and Content Engineering team observed a "rapid decline" in the volume of stock spam to the lowest point in 10 months.

June 27, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Boom! The Dept of Denfense has taken 1,500 PCs offline after a successful email attack. This happened late last week so they're probably back now and i guess attacks on the Pentagon aren't exactly new, but still. Anyway, those guys better hop they don't get caught, just look what happened to McKinnon.

June 25, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (2)

So a posting on the mailing list at InSecure.org comes from someone claiming to be in possession of a full copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The hacker, Gabriel, claims to have exploited PCs at  Bloomsbury Publishing and got away with a copy of the forthcoming manuscript. That's all believable and not really surprising. What's annoying is that the hacker posted a spoiler revealing the end of the book at the top of the posting, kind of spoiling it for everyone if it is actually true.

June 21, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (2)

We're all a bit too trusting online. One in four has shared sensitive personal information with complete strangers on social networking sites. It looks like those looking for love are particularly vulnerable though.

June 19, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Italy is under a barrage of remote attacks from hundreds of compromised websites, according to Symantec. More than 65,000 users had been redirected to the malicious page since Friday afternoon, and more than 7,000 successful exploits had been carried out.

Mpack seems to be the culprit here.

June 18, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ok, this probably won't come as much of a surprise, seeing as Wired leaked the documents months ago, but AT&T has allowed the documents describing its spy room to be unsealed. They even include a schematic of the set up the carrier used to snoop on some 10% of US domestic internet traffic. Thank goodness for whistleblowers eh?

June 14, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

A seemingly harmless worm spreading around the world could actually be a test run for more complicated Arabic viruses. Symantec reckons that the spread of the W32.Alnuh worm could just be checking people's reactions. Who knows? We have Chinese, German, Spanish and Russian viruses, why not Arabic?

More here

June 11, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Talk about looking for trouble - 4 per cent of all search results served up by major search engines are leading users to websits offering malware. The warning came out of a study by independent researcher Ben Edelman for McAfee.

Surprise, surprise, sponsored search results were especially likely to contain dangerous websites. The study found that 6.9 per cent of all sponsored results linked to risky sites.

June 5, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)