We seem to have pointed out rather often recently that giving away lots of information on Facebook, Twitter and other social network sites isn't a good idea. PleaseRobMe claims, somewhat amusingly, to be a resource for burglars, saving them the trouble of searching through Twitter and Foursquare for information on whose house is currently unoccupied. In

Perhaps you read the Mozilla blog at http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2010/02/04/please-read-security-issue-on-amo/ where it was revealed that two add-ons for Firefox were infected with Trojans. In this case the distribution was very small, so not many users were infected, but this type of attack is likely to grow. A large part of the time I worked at Microsoft I

[Part 6 of an occasional series, updating a blog series I ran in early 2009 to reflect changes in the threat landscape. This series will also be available shortly as a white paper.] Social Networks Can Be Very Anti-Social Don’t disclose sensitive information on websites like FaceBook or LinkedIn if you can’t be sure that you

OK, I'll save the novel for another time. However, there's a rather less ambitious snippet of my recent writing at http://www.eurograduate.com/article.asp?id=3015&pid=1, an article called "Fact, Fiction and the Internet," and, further to some of my recent posts here, touches on the dangers of social networking. Though you might think that someone with as many twitter

Social networking sites have become living biographies of people and may set them up for social engineering attacks. From time to time I enjoy looking to see what I can find out about people who send question to me using the AskESET@eset.com address. I won’t ever name names, but I wanted to share one example.

I came across an interesting article today on "Breaking the conventional scheme of infection" at the evil fingers blog site. Actually, it’s by my colleague in Argentinia, ESET Latin America Security Analyst, Jorge Mieres, but I didn’t realize that at first. (The original blog is in Spanish, and if your command of that language is

As reported at http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Twitter-XSS-Vulnerability-Still-Wide-Open-Developer-Says-433005/, a researcher has found a cross site scripting vulnerability that affects Twitter. The researcher claims that by exploiting this he could gain access to the Twitter accounts of anyone who views his specially crafted tweets. The explanation of the problem is a bit techie, but there is a very key point

I was speaking with our friend David Perry at Trend Micro about the insecurity of social networking services and what steps users could take to strengthen their security online. In the course of our conversation, we came up with a list of simple steps you could take to better protect yourselves. Be careful about whom you

I just read a startling news story about how someone didn’t understand what NOT to post on Facebook. The article titled “British spy chief’s cover blown on Facebook” tells how the wife of Sir John Sawers put up way too much information on Facebook. You can read the story at http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/20090706/tc_nm/us_britain_mi6 You don’t have to

It’s often claimed that men think about sex very seven seconds. Sorry, where was I? Oh yes… I’m not sure where that pseudo-statistic comes from: apparently not from the Kinsey report as is often claimed, and a more recent poll, while reflecting perhaps more liberated views about sexuality than could be admitted to in the