Monthly Archives: May 2011

Launch a Cyberattack, receive a Cruise Missile as a reward

The Wall Street Journal has two articles today that are on-topic for Information Technology (IT) Security.  The first is that the U.S. Defense Department has concluded that a cyberattack can constitute an Act of War, and thus be responded to … Continue reading

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Why you need more than one Anti-Malware product protecting you

I recently downloaded a file that I knew would be Malware.  It was called document.zip and was attached to a piece of mail that allegedly came from someone at FedEx.  The email headers were forged, and the mail itself wasn’t … Continue reading

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Malware or Not?

I’ve been doing an interesting experiment, in a virtual machine on a separate PC with no personal information  at all on it.  I’ve been going through SPAM emails and clicking on every link to see what happens.  It is an … Continue reading

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Expect a slow Q3 for Windows Phone 7 Apps

I fully expect the pace of new apps coming out of the Windows Phone 7 marketplace to decline over the summer before accelerating wildly this fall.  The reason is pretty obvious, developers are going to be turning their attention to … Continue reading

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Adobe Reader installing McAfee Security Scan Plus Scareware

When I recently upgraded a couple of computers to the latest version of Adobe Reader I discovered something very disturbing.  The download installs software from McAfee (of all people) that amounts to Scareware (a type of Malware that tries to … Continue reading

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How long does it take to get infected with Malware? About 5 minutes

Having a freshly setup PC, and virtual machine, I went looking for trouble.  I did a search for “medical forum” and up popped a link for medhelp.org.  I went to the site and created an account and then started navigating … Continue reading

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SenderID Followup

I wanted to do a bit of a followup to my earlier SenderID post both to better capture the comments and make another observation.  First I wanted to bring John Scarrow’s comment to the front of the discussion.  John is … Continue reading

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Is Skype really worth $8.5B to Microsoft?

$8.5B seems rather expensive to me, but I can understand why Microsoft would want Skype.  And I don’t think it is primarily for the reasons most people are saying. First of all, recognize that Microsoft already has two competing products.  … Continue reading

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Bing going Mobile

Yesterday we had the announcement that Bing would become the default Search and Mapping solution for the next generation of RIM’s Blackberry.  Over the previous year we’ve seen Microsoft introduce excellent Bing apps for the iPhone and more recently iPad, work … Continue reading

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Is Hotmail’s “Trusted Sender” feature more than just show?

One year ago Microsoft introduced a feature in Hotmail that marked mail from a set of “trusted senders”, primarily banks, with a Trusted Sender icon.  The idea was that if mail from your bank was marked with the icon you … Continue reading

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