Web Security Review

According to Websense, there are a lot of reasons for spammers to favor using GMail:

“…that from the spammers’ perspective, there are four main advantages to this approach. First, signing up for an account with Google allows access to its wide portfolio of services. Second, Google’s domains are unlikely to be blacklisted. Third, they are free to sign up. And fourth, it may be hard to keep track of them as millions of users worldwide are using various Google services on a regular basis.”

There are actions made by GMail to fix this problem as they come up with different methods in preventing such scam. GMail has invited certain users to have their closed beta test to intensify their security system

Scareware, or a form of malware that tricks customers with bogus messages that leads users to sites that install fake security software for a fee. These tactics have long been used by hackers to get hard earned cash from people’s pockets for nothing. The software you install in turn asks you to get more and more software till you finally get it that the whole thing was a sham, with your cash long gone and the errors they were reporting. Many of these sites have been targeted by law enforcement in the past few years but there are still some persistent ones that manage to survive the best efforts of law enforcement agents. Continue Reading »

A long standing botnet was closed with it’s manager arrested and subsequently charged with cyber-crimes leaving him to deal with a 5 year sentence of which he is to serve 2 in jail and the rest on conditional release. He will be allowed out on the conditions he would have limited access to computers and the internet, seemingly to follow the movie “Hackers”. This victory comes after a hosting firm based in California was ordered shut by the FTC and FBI after it was proven to have hosted malware spreading sites and spamming botnets. He even when as far as selling the services of his botnet, using “bots4sale” as a catch phrase to people he knew were going to use it for spamming of close to half a million computers the world over. Continue Reading »

Image source: www.blog.webreakstuff.com
This is an alarming news, everyone. We all know about Youtube, right? Well, it’s dangerous as MySpace, FaceBook, or any online community now. Given that Youtube also allows “pg 13” stuffs, but that’s not the danger we’re talking about. That’s right. Some of the pages in Youtube have links that opens malicious machines into your computer. These machines have the ability to save your computer’s keystrokes, copies data, or even control your computer for another hacking scheme. Some people can separate the real and the fraud just by looking in the URL in the status bar, but it is much safer if you just search it in youtube itself. You know why? Some hackers make their preys open these links by making them their friends first. They just did this just because this is the time of election in the US, and youtube-users provide videos about the election, or their insight.