A few days ago, I mentioned an email chain letter that’s going round in the UK about a scam where where "the bad guy poses as a telephone company operative and threatens to cut off service unless the panicked recipient of the call immediately pays an allegedly unpaid bill. Faced with a sceptical potential victim,

In the AV industry, we’re not unaccustomed to security scare stories met with a debunking response. For example, Peter Norton was quoted in 1988 in Insight as saying that computer viruses were an urban myth, like the alligators supposed to inhabit the sewers of New York. (He did change his mind around 1990 when he gave

Well, Mikeyy may not be the only security problem Twitter has right now, but the Hoodied Bore does seem to be doing an excellent job of exhausting everyone’s patience, including that of The Register’s John Leyden, who described him as "increasingly annoying". It appears that Mr. Mooney did take responsibility for at least the first

The Register’s John Leyden has harsh words to say today about problems with security software: "Once, running Windows anti-virus was like driving down a dual carriageway. These days, it’s more like an unpaved road." Well, I can understand his viewpoint, though given the sheer volume of security products these days, I’m not sure a small

This wouldn’t normally be the place to discuss the ongoing decline of the fortunes of the British Government, but there have been several IT-security-related stories coming out of the Mother of Parliaments worth a closer look. Back on March 10th, The Register reported that MP (Member of Parliament) Alun Michael had reported to the police that he

There are quite a few reports currently about particularly ugly development son the fake AV front. The Register’s John Leyden has referred to a "double dipping" attack, in which the notorious Antivirus 2009 is implicated in an attack that goes beyond offering useless rogue anti-malware to inflicting actual damage on user data files, in order to force the victim

Well, Adobe are still not speaking to me: I’ve had no information about updates to address the recent Acrobat vulnerability/exploits to either of the addresses I subscribed to its Security Notification Service. (See PPPS below.) However, something positive is happening out there in the old clay homestead: updates have arrived for a machine on which

As The Register has pointed out, the Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification for March 2009 doesn’t mention a forthcoming patch for the Excel vulnerability we’ve already flagged in this blog here and here and here. Since, as John Leyden remarks, the exploit is being actively exploited, it may seem that Microsoft are not taking the issue seriously

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.