According to a recent article published in the Wall Street Journal, and recapped on MediaBistro.com, the average user spends a lot of time on the social networks. just how much time? Well for the month of January 2012:
Some of you are bound to have noticed a distinct uptick in the amount of blogging we have been doing lately. My goal is to have one article to share every day. I am accomplishing this by writing my blog articles in Windows Live Writer. I write several of them at the same time, up to a week’s worth, and saving them as drafts, and then publish one a day in the morning. I have also installed a couple of ...
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Wire transfer emails from the Habbo Hotel, LinkedIn and UPS are scams that carry a Trojan horse program that can allow the attackers to take over your computer remotely. The attached .ZIP file contains the executable program. The full story can be found on Sophos.
Scams like these work because people want to believe that the unexpected “gift” of money is real. Fortunately, the Trojan horse appears to be easily removed by most ...
Continue Reading →Apple’s next operating system, Mountain Lion, is coming with a new feature called Gatekeeper, which is being touted as a way to keep malware from running on your Mac. Basically, if you have not specifically authorized an application in Gatekeeper, it shouldn’t run, and this would included malware applications. This seems like a revision of Windows User Account Control (UAC), which is the annoying little box the pops up with a “bonk” sound, graying out your screen, as asking if ...
Continue Reading →Occasionally, you may find that the windows controls are weirdly located off the top of the screen, or for some other reason, launching commands from a menu with the mouse is not going to work. in those situations, using keyboard shortcuts can help. These are hold-overs from the old pre mouse DOS and Unix days of computing, when the keyboard was the only input device, but they continue to be part of all operating systems. Thanks to Tech ...
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Thanks to Good Morning Silicon Valley via BoingBoing for this tidbit about the art of “knolling",” or arranging items in parallels or at 90 degree angles.
The article at the link details the origin of the word.
The article at the link details the origin of the word.
Hey, smartphone users! It is time to get some malware protection for your smartphone. According to Sophos, these are the top 5 malware exploits written for the Android platform.
Continue Reading →“1. Andr/PJApps-C. When Sophos Mobile Security for Android detects an app as Andr/PJApps-C it means that we have identified an app that has been cracked using a publicly available tool. Most commonly these are paid for apps that have been hacked. They are not necessarily always malicious, but are ...
There is buzz on the Internet that the three very successful cyber-war programs that the US and Israel launched against the Iranian Nuclear (Power? Weapons?)Program, had be distributed, at least in part, by masquerading as a standard Windows Update. For this to work, it makes sense that someone would have to be positioned inside Microsoft to assist in that part of the deployment. There is a longer article on IT World today that is worth the read if ...
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Spammers are driving traffic to a Canadian pharmacy website for Viagra and Cialis prescriptions using realistic looking Facebook notifications emails. Here is an example:
This example is from the Sophos blog. The basic play hear is for the spammers to earn money from your click-through that is paid by the pharmacy’s affiliate marketing campaign. In this particular case, there is no harm done except to your time. The trouble of course ...
Continue Reading →This post is the result of having read an Ars Technica post commenting on an article in The Scientific Method that reported on a study undertaken by the British banking industry. They were looking at the cost of installing security systems relative to the costs of letting the bank robbers just take the money. Basically, which costs more – security systems or the actual thefts? It turns out that in England the average back robbery nets about $31,000. ...
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