E-mail inventor: I didn't foresee spam
,----[ Quote ]
| He uses Thunderbird, an e-mail application developed by Mozilla, the company
| which distributes the Firefox web browser, but he also has a Gmail account.
|
| He said he once had to use Outlook – “I didn’t find it particularly
| attractive”, and that for a time he blocked all incoming messages from
| Hotmail, “because they used to carry a lot of viruses – though they’ve
| clamped down on that.”
`----
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3525110.ece
The Economics of Information Security
,----[ Quote ]
| Everyone knows that computer security is seriously broken. The daily
| onslaught of attacks caused by viruses, trojans and bots is testimony to
| that. But what many are unaware of - at least outside the open source
| community - is that much of the responsibility for this lies squarely with
| Microsoft. It is largely thanks to the poor design of Windows and its
| associated programs, particularly Internet Explorer and Microsoft Word, that
| viruses are transmitted so easily. It is a result of the poorly-designed
| approach to security, only now being fixed, that encourages users merrily to
| click on attachments and install new software without being aware of the
| consequences.
`----
http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=585
Related:
The battle against the botnet hordes
,----[ Quote ]
| Typically owners of machines forming a botnet do not know their computer has
| been hijacked. Home users account for 95% of all attacks mounted by botnet,
| according to figures from security firm Symantec.
|
| [...]
|
| DC Burls spends most of his time breaking the botnets, "They are complex
| investigations they're very time consuming, they cross international
| boundaries but we are making progress, they're very satisfying when you get a
| suspect before a court"
`----
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7256501.stm
In zombies we trust
,----[ Quote ]
| A little over a year ago, I wrote an editorial where in back-of-the-envelope
| style (.pdf) I estimated that perhaps 15-30% of all privately owned computers
| were no longer under the sole control of their owner. In the intervening
| months, I received a certain amount of hate mail but in those intervening
| months Vint Cert guessed 20-40%, Microsoft said 2/3rds, and IDC suggested
| 3/4ths. It is thus a conservative risk position to assume that any random
| counterparty stands a fair chance of being already compromised.
`----
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=661
Over 50% of corporate desktops infected with malware: IronPort
,----[ Quote ]
| The report also reveals that more than 50% of corporate desktops
| worldwide are infected with some type of spyware with the rate of
| infection as high as 70% in the United States. Trojans or malicious
| system monitors represented over 7% of the infections. Rootkits and
| trick loaders, which reinstall spyware and other obfuscation techniques,
| make remediation very difficult thus prevention is the key to stopping
| these threats.
`----
http://www.crn-india.com/breakingnews/stories/66870.html
Botnet 'pandemic' threatens to strangle the net
,----[ Quote ]
| Cerf estimated that between 100 million and 150 million of the
| 600 million PCs on the internet are under the control of hackers,
| the BBC reports.
`----
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/26/botnet_threat/
|
|
