[C. Nicholas Burnett, the manager for ESET LLC's tier three technical support, contributed the following guest blog article on the FireSheep plugin for Firefox.  Thank you very much, Carl!  Aryeh Goretsky] The past several days have seen the security community abuzz about a program presented in San Diego at ToorCon 12 this last weekend called

In the first two parts (Part 1, Part 2) of this series I discussed some of the privacy issues associated with Flash and also explained the configuration options that Adobe offers. If you are willing to go through the hassle of creating an mms.cfg file and maintaining it then you really do have the ability

Really – should any Alpha version be fed through a chipper-shredder like Diaspora has? The basics are simple: The basic premise behind Diaspora is that it will allow users to have social networking functionality similar to that offered by Facebook, but with far greater control over personal data. Diaspora was born earlier this year largely

Despite all those people who honoured May 31st 2010 as Quit Facebook Day – well, 31,000 people, maybe not an enormous dent in the 500 million users Facebook recently claimed – Facebook marches on. Clearly they're doing something right. But what? It's probably not the personal charm of founder Mark Zuckerberg, who when he's not

Do you have an iPhone or an Android based phone? Wait, don’t tell me, if you installed some third party apps I can probably find out. According to Lookout Inc., in an article at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100728/ap_on_re_us/us_tec_techbit_apps_privacy many of the iPhone and Android apps include spyware. To be fair, Lookout Inc didn’t call it spyware, but that

Mashable reports a halt to the insanity over privacy may be only a day away… On Sunday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised simplified privacy settings “in coming weeks.” It now looks like that timetable has been bumped up, with an executive at the social network revealing at an event in New York that new features

At least it’s easier to understand than the prompt from Facebook asking me to accept and open my connections which I saw a few weeks back. To manage your privacy on Facebook, you will need to navigate through 50 settings with more than 170 options. I’m starting to seriously consider switching to the next best

[Update: according to Neil Rubenking, FB chat is now working again and it's no longer possible to view friend requests or chat activity for other users.] I've just blogged yet again about Facebook and privacy: I don't usually publish the same content on different blog sites, but this is a recurrent hot topic in the ThreatBlog,

…but not in a good sense. Clearly there's a lot of confusion about the detail of Facebook's latest changes, as suggested by MSNBC at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36877160/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/, though it's clear enough that they don't amount to a victory for common sense and user privacy. But what do you do about it? Well, here's a good start. Social Media

Wow. File this under ‘how stupid thoughtless can any one person in a position of absolute power be…’ One school official abuses the built-in webcam access used with anti-theft software [legal malware] which they had packaged onto school laptops… to their own detriment. What sparked the discovery was Assistant Principal Lindy Matsko's assertion in early November that