Although ordinary people are targets of cybercrime, the US and other countries are also targets. On Friday, May 29th, President Obama talked publicly about the costs of cybercrime at a national level: …in the last two years alone, cyber thieves have cost Americans more than $8 billion and that last year worldwide they stole data [...]
Hopefully, you’ve taken a few moments to read the article I pointed to in my last post. I’ve read it several times now, as well as many of the 113 comments the article generated. For the most part, I found the comments of Matt Knox (the interviewee) to be enlightening and consistent with my own [...]
Here’s a fascinating interview with an Adware author. Wikipedia says “Adware or advertising-supported software is any software package which automatically plays, displays, or downloads advertisements to a computer after the software is installed on it or while the application is being used. Some types of adware are also spyware and can be classified as privacy-invasive [...]
This past weekend my wife and I visited the Kirkland, WA showroom of Lighting Universe. Although we didn’t end up buying anything to support our minor home remodel, we came close. So I gave my name and address to the woman behind the counter. Then she asked for my email address. I hestiated and asked [...]
The Netgear security blog recently published a Threat Lab report containing two “top ten” lists. The underlying data was collected in the first quarter of 2009. No surprises on the malware list. The fact that “job search” made it to #9 tells me the bad guys are paying attention to the newest ways to find [...]
My friend and colleague Mich Kabay, who is a regular contributor to NetworkWorld, has generously arranged to have published an article I wrote about why I started this blog. Thanks, Mich! It was a pleasure to collaborate with you, as always.
My blog refers to the “average” user of the Internet. Let me define what I mean by the word “average”. By way of analogy, I believe the mentality of the average Internet user is a lot like that of the average car driver. As an “average” car driver myself, I do not need to know [...]
The Wall Street Journal had a great article covering scareware on Wednesday, April 15th. These are often browser pop-ups that try to convince you that your computer is infected and for just $39.95 (with your credit card), all your troubles (caused by these guys) will disappear. I first experienced this stuff while using my Macintosh, [...]
Hello, my name is Kip and I’m a computer security junkie. My addiction started in 1992 and I’m still at it with no signs of stopping. One day, while working really hard as the chief information security officer at an insurance company, I realized that so much of our organization’s network security was in the [...]