Tag Archives: Computer virus

Scammers Scam Gmail Scam Filters

This amused me. A scam message got through Gmail’s eagle-eyed scam filters telling me to update my account details. That’s not unusual. But was it because the scammers added their own assurance that they had already done the filtering? It says: ************************************************************************** This footnote confirms that this email message has been scanned by New Google… Read More »

Stuck on Stuxnet

By Jeremy Wagstaff (this is my weekly Loose Wire Service column for newspaper syndication) We’ve reached one of those moments that I like: When we’ll look back at the time before and wonder how we were so naive about everything. In this case, we’ll think about when we thought computer viruses were just things that… Read More »

The Trojan That Never Was

How not to handle a PR debacle, Part 767: Avast, the free antivirus I’ve been using, and recommending, for while, has lost my confidence by a double whammy: mis-identifying pretty much every executable on my computer as a Trojan, and then not telling me about it. Apparently an update to the software will misidentify a… Read More »

Virus Grounds French Fighters

Here’s more evidence of how vulnerable armed forces are to software attacks, intended or not. The French navy’s fighter jets “were unable to download their flight plans after databases were infected by a Microsoft virus they had already been warned about several months beforehand,” according to the Telegraph: However, the French navy admitted that during… Read More »

The Hazards of Recommending

Think twice before you agree to recommend someone on LinkedIn. They may be a logic bomber. You may have already read about the fired Fannie Mae sysadmin who allegedly placed a virus in the mortgage giant’s software. The virus was a bad one: it was set to execute at 9 a.m. Jan. 31, first disabling… Read More »