SonicWALL Phishing and Spam IQ Quiz

Chances are that in the past week you’ve received an e-mail in your inbox that pretends to be from your bank, e-commerce vendor, or other on-line site. Hopefully you’ve realized that many times this e-mail is fake – a phishing or spam e-mail. The sender (phisher) of these fake e-mails wants you to click on the link in the e-mail and go to a phishing Web site – which will look just like the Web site of the company being phished. Once on the phishers Web site they hope to obtain your account, financial, credit and even identity information. Of course not every e-mail you receive is a phish. In fact you should expect your bank or e-commerce vendor to send you legitimate e-mail. But how can you tell the difference? Well that’s what the Phishing IQ test is all about – give it a try.

Source:
http://www.sonicwall.com/phishing/

Posted in Internet, Privacy, Security | 1 Comment

Symantec tool calculates your data’s value to thieves

It’s no secret that criminals are stealing credit card and bank account data and selling it underground. But most people would find it shocking to learn just how little their sensitive personal information costs.

Symantec on Thursday is launching its Norton Online Risk Calculator, a tool that people can use to see how much their online information is worth on the black market. The tool also offers a risk rating based on demographics, online activity, and estimated value of online information.

I tried the tool when I was initially briefed on it a few months ago and was surveyed about my gender and age range; online assets (including credit card and bank account data, brokerage accounts, e-mail accounts, and social network accounts) and an estimated value of all that information; whether I use security software; how cautious I am when online; and how much I think my information is worth.

I use security software (and do my financial transactions mostly on a Mac at home), am fairly cautious while Web surfing, and didn’t put a high dollar figure on the value of my digital information. My security risk turned out to be 37 percent, or medium, and the black market worth of my online assets was calculated to be $11.29. Those figures didn’t change when I modified the gender, age, and estimated value of the data.

Source:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10258549-245.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

Posted in Internet, Privacy, Security | No Comments

Firefox 3.5.3 Released!

Firefox 3.5.3 fixes the following security issues:

• Chrome privilege escalation with FeedWriter
• Location bar spoofing via tall line-height Unicode characters
• TreeColumns dangling pointer vulnerability
• Crashes with evidence of memory corruption (rv:1.9.1.3/1.9.0.14)

Help > Check for Updates or download here:
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox

Posted in Internet, Privacy, Security | No Comments

7 Reasons Websites Are No Longer Safe

Conventional wisdom is that Web wanderers are safe as long as they avoid sites that serve up pornography, stock tips, games and the like. But according to recently gathered research from Boston-based IT security and control firm Sophos, sites we take for granted are not as secure as they appear.

Among the findings in Sophos’ threat report for the first six months of this year, 23,500 new infected Web pages — one every 3.6 seconds — were detected each day during that period. That’s four times worse than the same period last year, said Richard Wang, who manages the Boston lab. Many such infections were found on legitimate websites.

In a recent interview with CSOonline, Wang outlined seven primary reasons legitimate sites are becoming more dangerous.

Full Story:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9137767/7_Reasons_Websites_Are_No_Longer_Safe?source=rss_security

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2010 could be the last year for IPv4

We’ve known we would run out of IPv4 addresses since 1981, when the Internet Protocol was standardized. The numbers dictate that there will never be more than 4,294,967,296 different IPv4 addresses. (4 billion and change being the number of combinations that can be made with IPv4’s 32 address bits). Before 1993, addresses were given out in very large blocks because of technical limitations in routing protocols. This limitation was lifted, but around the same time, the Internet started to become more mainstream, requiring more and more addresses.

This was also the moment the IETF realized that at some point, we’d run out of IP addresses. Its estimated date for the well to run dry was 2005. Although they got the year wrong, they were right about their notion that 32 bits wasn’t enough for the decades to come.

The invention of network address translation (NAT), which allows multiple systems to share a single address, has been credited for stretching the life of IPv4, but two other technologies were also very important. Variable length subnetting makes it possible to give different subnetworks the appropriate size address block, and ethernet switching made it possible to have much larger subnets, reducing wasteful subdivision of networks.

Source:
http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/09/2010-could-be-the-last-year-for-ipv4-as-we-know-it.ars

Posted in Internet, Networking | No Comments