Facebook is really, really good at coming up with new ideas, but reasonably well thought out ideas from Facebook seem a bit harder to come by. This is an issue that recently came up when Facebook decided that they would start allowing third party developers to gather address and phone number information and share it

It is unfortunate, but a fact that many organizations are going to suffer hacks. The internet was designed to be a cybercriminal’s dream. That was not the intent of the internet, but the design certainly is such that it serves the purpose well. Fortunately it also serves many great purposes quite well too. News came

My good friend David Harley just blogged about Facebook’s brand new way to misappropriate your data without your consent. Alas, in underestimating how far Facebook will go to attempt to avoid allowing you to control your privacy, David missed the second setting that is required if you do not want Facebook to decide what companies

The Australian Communications and Media Authority is planning to impose harsh penalties on support desk scammers. (Hat tip to Andrew Hayter for drawing my attention to that item.) According to chairman Chris Chapman, nearly half of all the complaints they've received about calls to numbers on the Do Not Call Register have been about cold-calling

You may not be aware that ESET writers have been supplying blogs to SC Magazine for a while now. Recently, Randy Abrams and I were drafted in after the original contributors moved on, and we started contributing this week: Poachers and Gamekeepers considers whether there is a conflict of interest when AV companies work with

Many Facebook users are annoyed to discover that their names and faces can be used in sponsored FB ads. Indeed, according to Dan Tynan in IT World, the next phase will to allow 3rd-party advertisers to do the same thing inside Facebook apps. I'm not a great fan of the FB principle of all your

One that will be of most interest to our readers in the UK, I guess. Our friends at Virus Bulletin are holding another "Securing Your Organization in the Age of Cybercrime" seminar, this time on the Open University Campus at Milton Keynes on the 24th May. The full agenda is already available on that page, and

[Update: more information from ESET on this malware here.] Last October, my colleague Tasneem Patanwala blogged about rogue antivirus masquerading as an ESET product. In that instance it was a product calling itself Smart Security, and Tasneem's blog includes lots of useful information about that particular malware, and fake AV in general. Looking through my

As the number of apps for smartphones continues to grow, perhaps your paranoia about such apps should be growing as well. In an unusual statement, the former director of the CIA has warned that the government isn’t sharing enough information about cyber security. In an article at http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/03/hayden-cyber/, retired four-star Gen. Michael Hayden is quoted

The BBC program Panorama last night investigated claims that the News of the World hired a hacker to break into a subject's PC to steal emails. In fact, it appears that the unnamed hacker installed a Trojan on the victim's PC. Which sounds like a fairly unequivocal breach of the Computer Misuse Act, which outlaws