The paper by Julio Canto and myself on the use and misuse of multi-scanner malware-checking resources like VirusTotal is now available.

How do you know a service is legitimate and safe? We all have to trust by proxy sometimes, but it just doesn’t feel right to encourage people to accept reassuring statements as gospel.

You don't need more advice from me on avoiding phishing following the Epsilon fiasco: Randy, among others has posted plenty of sound advice, and I put some links to relevant articles here, though I don't know of anyone who's published a list of the whole 2,500 or so companies that are apparently Epsilon's customers, though comment threads

Before I started today’s flurry of blogs, I was uncharacteristically quiet: first I was at an AMTSO event in San Mateo, then at RSA in San Francisco…

…given the amount of detailed analysis that’s already available (and I mean substantial blocks of reverse-engineered code, not high-level analysis and code snippets and descriptions), I’m not sure that anyone with malicious intent and a smidgen of technical skill would need the original code…

After quite a few months of trying to raise public awareness of the problem of fake support cold-calling both here [and elsewhere, it's good to see other vendors also starting to publicize the issue. I've previously cited an article by Symantec's Orla Cox that describes one exchange of civilities with one of the scammers, and

Perhaps you're getting as tired of this thing as I am (though with the information still coming in, I'm not going to be finished with this issue for a good while, I suspect).  But without wishing to hype, I figure it's worth adding links to some further resources. There's a very useful comment by Jake