Information Protection and Security

Judge Jeremy Fogel on Thursday ordered the self-anointed spam king Sanford Wallace to pay the damages for accessing user accounts without authorization and spamming "friends" through messages and "wall" posts, Sam O'Rourke, senior counsel at Facebook, said Thursday night on the company's blog.

Many times attackers use social engineering tactics to trick victims into installing malware.  Malware is short for malicious software and includes Trojans, worms, viruses, etc. It can do any number of things to disable your computer and make life and computing frustrating.  To begin with, don’t be fooled by fake antivirus tools in pop-up windows, emails with embedded links and/or rusecuretelling you to provide confidential information (passwords, bank account numbers, etc) .  Stay away from links on social networking sites.  They’re a hotbed for the distribution of malware, often by sharing links by way of compromised accounts.  Spammers also send email looking like software upgrade advisories to trick you into installing malicious programs.  Stop. Think. Secure IT!

Cyber criminals have stolen at least $40 million from small to mid-sized companies across America in a sophisticated but increasingly common form of online banking fraud, the FBI said this week.

Cyber criminals have stolen at least $40 million from small to mid-sized companies across America in a sophisticated but increasingly common form of online banking fraud, the FBI said this week.

 Yesterday I received a "hot tip" from a friend in the form of an email offering a free laptop from Sony-Ericsson if I forwarded the offer to 8 people on my address list.  I'd get even a better laptop if I sent it to 20.  Too good to be true, right?  Right!  A quick visit to snopes.com answered my question and straightened out my friend.  Not only was there no laptop, but the person's name on the offer never existed.  It was a pretty picture of a nice laptop!  Urban legends, they're also in email.  Check before you send, or you might be sorry!  Stop. Think. Secure IT!

Microsoft on Wednesday said it is fixing a bug in Bing that allowed spammers to bypass spam filters and distribute malicious links.

That isn't surprising. Spam traffic has hovered in the 83 to 86 percent range for about a year. What is alarming is that spam-based malware traffic -- i.e., malware that "piggybacks" on top of (or is otherwise linked to via) spam messages -- increased dramatically last month, surging by 900 percent between August and September. At one point in September, Symantec reports, malware accounted for almost 5 percent of all spam traffic.

Be on the lookout for suspicious tweets like these and don't follow links indiscriminately.
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The industry-wide phishing scam that has affected popular web mail services such as Hotmail and GMail, is spreading, according to experts.

Security researcher Roger Thompson, of AVG Technologies, today said his company in recent days discovered numerous Facebook pages that were clearly created in an automated fashion using malware programs. The pages are being used to spam links pointing to malicious sites. Users who click on the link are prompted to install rogue anti-spyware tools on their systems, he said.