It was bound to happen, and it always pays to be first: Who’s going to estimate how much damage MyDoom did? Rob Rosenberger, editor of Vmyths, predicted it right: The winner is British security consultant mi2g, which reckons the damage will cost us all $38.5 billion. That’s a lot of cash. Vmyths is not impressed, dismissing … Read more
The problem with spam filters that work on the server level is that you end up missing literary gems. I was pretty excited when I found out a few weeks back that spammers were using literary works in their subject fields. I wrote a few weeks back in the Far Eastern Economic Review (sorry, subscription only; … Read more
Will all libraries eventually be digital? Seems a pretty obvious question (answer: yes) but the process is surprisingly slow. I do research online and use databases like Questia but there’s still a hell of a lot that hasn’t been made available. And a lot of what is scanned has not been scanned well, unless the … Read more
As feared, MyDoom seems to come from Russia. Or does it? The Moscow Times quotes Kaspersky Labs as saying they used location-sensing software to trace the first e-mails infected with MyDoom back to addresses with Russian Internet providers. “It’s scary, but most serious viruses are written in Russia,” said Denis Zenkov, spokesman for Kaspersky, the … Read more
Here’s evidence that ‘phishing’ – the art of conning users into handing over banking and other passwords by fake, but convincing-looking emails and website — may have branched out into viruses and worms. Symantec, McAfee and Sophos have published details of a new virus/trojan called Stawin (also known, because the anti virus people don’t seem … Read more