The big anti-virus vendors often stand accused (rightly) of exaggerating the danger and impact of viruses; Not surprising they do that, they make money out of protecting people from viruses. But why would the U.S. government do it? Here’s a great piece by Mary Landesman of about.com complaining about US CERT, a newly formed partnership between the… Read More »
It was bound to happen, and it always pays to be first: Who’s going to estimate how much damage MyDoom did? Rob Rosenberger, editor of Vmyths, predicted it right: The winner is British security consultant mi2g, which reckons the damage will cost us all $38.5 billion. That’s a lot of cash. Vmyths is not impressed, dismissing… Read More »
The problem with spam filters that work on the server level is that you end up missing literary gems. I was pretty excited when I found out a few weeks back that spammers were using literary works in their subject fields. I wrote a few weeks back in the Far Eastern Economic Review (sorry, subscription only;… Read More »
Will all libraries eventually be digital? Seems a pretty obvious question (answer: yes) but the process is surprisingly slow. I do research online and use databases like Questia but there’s still a hell of a lot that hasn’t been made available. And a lot of what is scanned has not been scanned well, unless the… Read More »
As feared, MyDoom seems to come from Russia. Or does it? The Moscow Times quotes Kaspersky Labs as saying they used location-sensing software to trace the first e-mails infected with MyDoom back to addresses with Russian Internet providers. “It’s scary, but most serious viruses are written in Russia,” said Denis Zenkov, spokesman for Kaspersky, the… Read More »