I was thinking about computers the other day, which I'm prone to do on occasion, and I realized that I still harbor fond memories of the Commodore64 that I begged my parents to buy for "the family" back in the early 80s. The Fabuli's had resisted the lure of the Commodore VIC-20 (barely) for a little while, but when my older brother vacated the homestead for university and the city, the modern technology provided by the C64 moved into his empty bedroom. The C64 played a large part in forming the basis of my interest in computing and IT. Coupled with the fact that I had now had unrestricted access to the room that had only weeks previous been OFF-LIMITS, these two factors meant that I now had two brand new worlds to conquer.
Oh. I mentioned the family earlier. Of the thousands of hours of service the Commodore64 provided, my parents might have spent 24 hours on it between them. The rest of the time I was playing games, showing off for my mom using...
As reported in the February State of Spam report, we have observed spammers disguising themselves as the IRS and dangling an offer of a tax refund to unwitting recipients. That is, a refund made available once you input your credit card information into their site. A site that does not bear the IRS URL. A site that is fraudulent and nothing more than a collection tool for credit card and other personal information. And while we are still seeing this, we have recently observed a few new types of spam in relation to tax season. This spam being of a more sinister type as it directs you to download a virus.
In one example, the spammer indicates that a new law requires you to download tax software. Well, that in itself is ridiculous because taxes are traditionally done on paper and there is no...
Social engineering was the driving forcebehind spammers during the month of February. While overall spam volumehovered steadily at 78.5% of email and tactics remained relatively thesame, the use of events, big brands, and public figures drove spamcampaigns during the month. The March State of Spam report highlights several of these.
With the U.S. presidential elections just around the corner thecandidates have turned their focus on each other, just as spammers havefocused their campaigns on the candidates. The first example of thiswas spam leveraging Ron Paul back in October of 2007. Last month,spammers began to spread bogus links purporting to show a HillaryClinton speech, but in actuality the links were cloaking a maliciousTrojan. Most recently we’ve seen spammers leveraging the last remainingfront-runners of the 2008 presidential elections;...
