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In the News: A Small Respite from Spam
Some good news on the spam front this month: worldwide spam was cut in half when a single web hosting firm was shut down, The Washington Post reported. McColo Corp, a company based in San Jose, California (but claiming a Delaware mailing address), allegedly operated servers that sent spam messages for various international groups. These clients, in […]
Marketing Hall of Shame: Cleanse Your Colon (And Your Grasp of Reality)
I received this spam email a few days ago. The subject line caught me first: “Cleanse and Flush up to 20lbs from your colon!” The rest of the email reads like this:
Lose Weight With Your Mate! - Flush out up to 25 pounds - Remove Deadly Toxic Buildup - Relieve Constipation and Bloating - Best of […]
Charity Telemarketers: Should You Give?
At this festive time of year, you might notice a few more phone calls than usual. The holidays are a prime time for telemarketers to amp up their solicitations and try harder to get your business. And if you’re on the Do Not Call List (which you should be), you could still get calls from charities working to […]
Happy Holidays, Unhappy Environment
The holidays are coming, and that means more unsolicited catalogs and direct mail offers crammed into your mailbox than ever. While unsolicited mail is annoying at any time of year, the flood of junk mail usually hits hardest in November and December, all in the hopes that you’ll make holiday purchases from the piles of possible vendors that the postman […]
The tried-and-true identity theft technique: Talking you into giving up your information
This week, I had the good fortune to see a presentation by Kevin Mitnick, the former hacker who now makes a living as a security consultant. I went into the talk expecting a 90-minute lesson on the latest tools and toys that hackers might use to steal my identity. Instead, Mitnick’s very engaging lecture was […]
Backscatter Spam is an Undeliverable Pain
A few years ago, I was checking my Yahoo! email account and saw that I had received dozens of strange emails. All of them were listed as “undeliverable,” as if I’d sent the emails out, but then they’d gone to a nonexistent email address and bounced back to me. The problem was, I didn’t recall […]
Enter to win, and you’ll lose
You’re walking through the shopping mall, and you see a shiny chrome motorcycle sitting in the center of the atrium. Beside it is a huge sign: “Win this bike!” There is a stack of entry cards sitting on a table, and people are filling out the cards and dropping them into a slotted box. You think […]
Warning! You Might Be Fooled Into Clicking This Pop-Up
Have you ever been clicking your way through cyberspace, when suddenly, a very important-looking window pops up? It usually looks like it’s part of Microsoft Windows, and it says something like, “Warning! Your computer is at risk! Click ‘OK’!” Do you click on it? Is your computer really at risk? Is Windows trying to tell […]
Clickjacking: Big Problem, Not Much Solution (Yet)
This week’s security threat: clickjacking.
Clickjacking is the latest in a series of security threats to web surfers. The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) issued a warning about clickjacking on September 26, and the news has spread quickly. This is a crime in which hackers hide behind harmless-looking websites so that people who visit them might be […]
October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month
Across the country this month, cyber security professionals, software companies and government agencies are working to raise awareness of online security issues by encouraging people to protect their computers, educate themselves and take responsibility for online security. The Department of Homeland Security’s National Cyber Security Division (NCSD) is sponsoring this fifth-annual event and partnering with the National Cyber Security […]
