Guess What? I'm now blogging for Creative Weblogging on our new I GOT SPAM blog. Like this blog, the topic is malware. I likely won't be cross-posting much and spending more time on the new blog and very little time on this one. If your a regular, then you might want to subscribe over there too. You can get it via Rmail by clicking on the Rmail button below.

http://www.igotspam.com/ Rmail

Peter Pollack: Engineers at Panda Software, while in the process of researching a new trojan, uncovered evidence this week that led them to a web site touting custom-built viruses for sale. For the low, low price of only US$990, a user gets his or her own pet trojan horse, complete with tech support. If the file is discovered—as this current model was—the designer provides a guarantee to alter it so that it may continue to avoid detection in the face of updated antivirus software.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060225-6264.html

CNN: A malicious computer worm has been found that targets Apple Computer Inc.'s Mac OS X operating system, believed to be the first such virus aimed specifically at the Mac platform.

http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/17/technology/apple_virus.reut/

Randy: The virus quickly spread to all three Mac computers. Why would someone write a virus that attacks only 5% of computers?

Dale Begg-Smith of AdsCPM made his fortune from Spyware according to this article.

Read the entire article.

Joris Evers: Companies could find themselves put up for public humiliation by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission if they continue to advertise through insidious ad-serving software.

http://news.com.com/2100-7349_3-6037662.html

Randy: This is a great idea! Even if the FTC doesn't move forward, we can do this out in the open.

EFF: Google today announced a new "feature" of its Google Desktop software that greatly increases the risk to consumer privacy. If a consumer chooses to use it, the new "Search Across Computers" feature will store copies of the user's Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets and other text-based documents on Google's own servers, to enable searching from any one of the user's computers. EFF urges consumers not to use this feature, because it will make their personal data more vulnerable to subpoenas from the government and possibly private litigants, while providing a convenient one-stop-shop for hackers who've obtained a user's Google password.

http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_02.php

Randy: Google had to know this was coming. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! First thing, if you are an enterprise IT manager, then you should be blocking this feature at the firewall. Just imagine all the mundane users that are gonna install this at work and have all the company's private documents uploaded to Google's server.

I'm now pretty much doing email by the seat of my pants. If you sent me an email in the last 24 hours, then I likely didn't read it. It all started about 17 hours ago, when I started receiving the same SPAM email over-and-over. No matter how many times I marked the email as SPAM, Gmail continued to drop the email in my Inbox. I reviewed the email's original content and each email is identical except the sending and receiving email addresses. What's new? Gmail SPAM filtering sucks and is getting worse.

I created a filter to automatically move the missed SPAM into the Trash folder. Then I went to sleep. ... I wake up in the morning and for the first time in years, I have no email in my Inbox. Nothing for 14 hours. It seems that Gmail is no longer accepting any of my email. Period. I even sent an email directly to my Gmail account and it hasn't arrived. No email in the Trash or SPAM bucket in 16 hours.

I switched my Inbox over to Yahoo! mail. Yahoo! mails interface sucks and I haven't got my invite to the beta. I also tried Hotmail and live.com, which suck even more.

Update: Just wanted to point out the Yahoo! mail SPAM filter sucks too! Maybe I have to write my own Webmail client.

PR: Safer Internet Day will take place on 7 February 2006.

http://www.saferinternet.org/ww/en/pub/insafe/news/insafe20060118.htm

Antone Gonsalves:  America Online Inc. and Yahoo Inc. on Monday said they planned to launch certified email services that would bypass spam filters and deliver messages directly to subscribers.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=179100768

TechTree: Sex sells and the new internet worm (Nyxem-E) nick-named the "Kama Sutra worm" because it spreads under the guise of pornographic content, has leap-frogged lesser viruses reaching top-spot on world virus charts.

• http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/nyxem_e.shtml
• http://www.viruslist.com/en/viruses/encyclopedia?virusid=109064

Last week, I had the forturne of one of my x-cow-orkers joining the malware photo sharing Website called Ringo. While trying to get this persons photos, Ringo asked me for my MSN username and password. WTF? Now, I know how I got spammed, I'm an MSN friend of this x-cow-orker. Import your MSN list and SPAM them all. Well, I'm not that stupid. I entered false credentials, never got further and exited the session. Too late, now I'm getting regular SPAM email from Ringo.

http://www.ringo.com/

Let's move forward with Splogger Challenge II. This guy is stealing content, excerpting some, but not providing a link back. Then he monetizes by splashing AdSense. The excerpted articles without the link back are completely incomprehensible.

http://seo-news-articles.b-1st.com/  << NOFOLLOW

Please click on his AdSense where it says "Ads by Google", the click "Send Google your thoughts on the ads you just saw" and tell Google to cut off his AdSense because he's splogging.