SPAM Counts
My GMail account has stopped 440 SPAM emails in the last 30 days which is a 9% increase from last week’s 30 day total. My other website has had 378 spam comments stopped by Akismet and none made it through. The Spam Chronicles is up to four stopped Spam comments
Spam/Virus News
Yahoo news had a story about US Stae Department computer being hacked via email. The email included what seemed like a legitimate Microsoft Word attachment. But when the document was opened. The document contained code that exploited a previously unknown vulnerability witch was then reported to Microsoft. It took Microsoft 8 weeks to deliver a patch.
While Spam can be used to deliver the exploits to large numbers of PCs, Techworld is reporting an increase in targeted spam attackes to deliver exploits. This sounds like what happened to the State Department incident since they received a Word document that appeared legitimate for them (text of a speach).
Computing has an article about how spammers exploited the Virginia tech tragedy to deliver spyware which is related to the Computing News report of a increase of spam combined with social engineering.
CNET News had a couple of PC security related articles this week. The first talks about the increasing complexity of rootkits. The second talks about their improved ability to hide malicious code in a website.
Wired news has a column title “How Security Companies Sucker Us With Lemons“. It’s about how bad security products, because they can be cheap, push the good security products out of the market. People see the lower prices which lowers the price they are willing to pay which in turn pushes the good (more expensive) products out of the market. In addition to price, ease of use and setup is a critical factor. By it’s nature security tends to be more intrusive so in many cases ease of use means a lack of security. It’s easier for most people (including IT professionals who don’t specialize in security) to evaluate products on ease of use than it is on true security.
Software Updates
The following software, which is free for personal, non-commercial use was recently updated.
Avast Antivirus has ben updated to version 4.7.986 (from 4.7.942). If you run this software it should update automatically
AntiVir Personal has been updated to version 7.00.04.13 and includes Vista support.
AVG Free Edition has been updated to version 7.5.463
If you don’t have current anti-virus and spyware protection you should check out the “Free Security Software” links in the left sidebar. Windows XP SP2 also has a built-in firewall that’s on by default. You can also check out the “Trial Security Software” section on the links page to try additional software. Several of the trials are full-featured (but time limited) so you can see if you PC has spyware or viruses and clean it if it does,