Do you use Google? These days the question sounds almost absurd. If you use the Internet, or an iPhone, or an Android phone, or a Kindle or an iPad, then of course you use Google in some shape or form. And if you take a keen interest in how your personal information is used, you

Spoof or SPOF? IT Security reportage veteran John Markoff reports in the New York Times that the attack on Google's intellectual property reported in January was even more interesting (and disquieting) than most of us realized. According to an unnamed source, some of the information stolen related to the company's password system, Gaia. Gaia is a

Aleksandr Matrosov, Senior Virus Researcher at ESET Russia, has brought to our attention an avalanche of reports of hacked Gmail accounts. While the exact nature of the hack isn't confirmed, it appears that spammers were able to access the victim's address books in order to send junk mail from the compromised accounts to their owner's

We're not really set up to use the ThreatBlog as a full strength Questions and Answers resource, but we got so many questions after my blog yesterday about April 1st hoaxes that I feel obliged to try to answer some of them. There is no truth in the rumour that the eCity of San Diego

Last summer (June 2009), I posted about an example of a very common scam that relies on the scammer gaining access to someone else's email or Facebook account, then sending messages to all their contacts claiming that they've been mugged while abroad on business or vacation, and need their friends to send them some money

Perhaps you have seen the recent buzz around Google Buzz. The fact is that Google has decided that anything it knows about you it is free to share with the world at its discretion and not only do you not need to be told, but if you say no they will say yes for you.

Recently there were reports of tens of thousands of hotmail passwords being posted on the web. In reality Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo mail, and all email services are regularly being phished. If you receive an email telling you to provide your password it is a phish. That is as simple as it gets. Never give out

The Register today ran a story about the phishing attack spread by the Google Talk instant messaging system, which uses TinyURL to conceal the real name of the link. John Leyden’s story (quoting Graham Cluley at some length) makes several good points about reducing your exposure to the threat, and Graham’s blog makes some more.