Just got phishing spam from bad guys pretending to the Bank of Ireland. Here’s the email: If you are fooled into clicking the link, you are redirected to: http://personalbanking.bankofireland.obfusticated.com/ie/ie/authentication.html?e1s1 The “obfusticated” prevents anyone from actually going to the bad site, and protects the wordpress user whose website (“obfusticated.com”) has been compromised. For what it’s worth, […]
The incidence of email hijacking is on the rise – spammers have discovered that many email accounts are child’s play to get into. Once done, the victim’s entire address book is scarfed up and used to send out spam, phishing solicitations or malware. First of all, I hope these wastes of human cytoplasm find themselves […]
Back in 1998, Scott Adams did a Dilbert strip that made many IT professionals cringe in sympathy. As painful as this may seem, it’s one of the few times that Adams had underestimated where technology was going. Ars Technica recently published an article entitled “Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger.” […]
The faster processors like CPU’s and GPU’s become, in addition to using them for byzantine calculations like orbital mechanics, finding the largest prime number ever, bitcoin mining, economic theory, and figuring out how many angels can dance on the head of of a pin, more hackers will use them to try to crack your password. […]
Passwords are the bane of computer users and IT administrators, and – for the most part – an open, beckoning door to hackers, scammers, and Russian Viagra spammers. But until someone comes up with something more practical and secure, we need them. Sure, people are trying. Fingerprint scanning, retinal scanning, all sorts of biometric stuff is […]
Holy Mother of Mogg! I don’t use my Hotmail account very often, but I keep it around for a few odd reasons. I just saw a post at reddit and thought I’d better check my own account. And that’s only the last few days! Folks wonder why their email accounts get hacked; with this kind of […]
For about 13 years, I owned a small business. I had a strict no-spamming policy. So it was extra-annoying to find that Russian Businesss Network had hacked my email account (even though I use strong passwords, this one was obviously not strong enough – a case in point!) and sent spamvertising to my entire customer […]
With all the good food to eat in the world, compounded by reality shows about celebrity chefs and such things, it’s easy as pie to gain weight. (I see what I did there.) But getting it off is another matter. Which is why the weight loss industry, including its concomitant multilevel marketing products, homeopathic remedies, […]
If you get a screen like this while doing something like trying to log in to Facebook or something else, usually as a result of clicking on a link after a web search, you are being scammed. Typically your browser locks up – you can’t go back, you can’t navigate to anything else, and you […]
I’ve written about scams that get you to call a phone number and help bad guys access your computer before. Here’s another variety you need to be aware of. My wife’s computer has had this happen twice in the last few weeks (click the image for a larger view): Chrome is locked up – you […]
Playing in the World Game 