Information Protection and Security

ILOVEYOU was a major event, perhaps the first really major malware event on the Internet. There had been others before, including Melissa, which must have been a technical inspiration for ILOVEYOU, but ILOVEYOU hit a lot of people.
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Swine flu spam is spreading like a virus of its own and recently turned malicious.
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College-focused spammers indicted on 51 counts under federal CAN-SPAM Act.
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A Vietnamese security company has detected what it believes is a new worm that thwarts Google's security protections in order to register new dummy Gmail accounts from which to send spam.
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"In just 12 hours, one bot alone sent out 42,298 spam messages." Windows PCs infected with the Conficker worm have turned into junk mail-spewing robots capable of sending billions of spam messages a day, a security company warned today.
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Always be on the lookout for notices that you must download a special "codec" or "media player" in order to view content, generally a video. These days such cases are almost exclusively invitations to malware.

Security experts say consumers must keep updates for anything to do with their browser current, though most now do not do this. This includes updates for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome, Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, iTunes, QuickTime, Windows Media Player and RealPlayer. Such updates increasingly include important security patches that can block infections from taking hold.

A Texas securities lawyer and former employee of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has been indicted on charges related to a stock pump-and-dump scheme that used spam e-mail to pump up the stock prices of several companies.

Traditional security systems may be ineffective and become obsolete in warding off Web attacks launched by countries, according to Val Smith, founder of Attack Research. New attack trends include blog spam and SQL injections from Russia and China. Hackers use Web browsers as exploitation tools to spread malware and collect sensitive information. 

Yet another malicious email outbreak is soaring around the Internet. This one is specifically targeting those that are job hunting. The email messages masquerade as job offers or responses to job inquiries.