Thank you Akismet, the blogger’s Saviour!

I reached another blogging milestone of sorts overnight. The Akismet plug-in has now blocked it’s first 1,000 spam comments. Thanks Akismet, and all the folks at WordPress for having the vision and good sense to include it in your offering. The accuracy is incredible and it has never failed me even as my traffic and spam have increased four fold over the past month.

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Watch out, there’s Paypal Spam About..or..How to Spot a Fake

I’ve decided to post this for 2 reasons:

1. Despite all the scaremongering that the security and anti-virus companies in our industry engage in, I dont get all that much spam, especially phishing emails
2. I hope this will help educate others to spot a fake and avoid the thievery of phishing artists

I received this email at the weekend. Thanks to Gmail, it went straight in my spam folder but I couldn’t resist a peak when I saw it titled Account Managment.

I’ve highlighted the giveaway signs that this is a fake :

1. The originating address is a Yahoo.com account created under the name PayPal Security Center
2. The URL that you’re asked to follow to “update your account information” does not mention PayPal nor any valid portion of an actual PayPal site URL, simplying referring to an IP address that could be Joe Bloggs in God knows where.

Following the URL brings you to a very convincing recreation of the PayPal homepage, but in my case Firefox immediately flagged it as a reported phishing page.

If this helps just 1 person avoid a rip off it’s worth the time taken to post so please keep your browser and it’s plug-ins up to date to make sure you catch this sort of thing.noelia youtube harry potter ron paul iphone harry potter spoiler galilea montijo el jueves theresa duncan paris hilton twango google facebook music deathly hallows

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Is LinkedIn’s security shot?….or just me?

I’ve just logged in to LinkedIn and was greeted by something out of the ordinary, LinkedIn thinks I’m Moe! Now who the hell Moe is (or his buddy Ken Halpin) I’ve no idea.

The funny thing is though, if I click on the My Contacts or My Profile tabs it does show my own profile and correct contacts.

Looks like something screwy is going on with the login. I must add though that I’ve managed to reproduce this several times in the last half hour and it even happened after running CCleaner to banish cookies etc.

Has anyone else experienced this over the last few hours or days? I see no mention of planned maintenance etc that might cause this behaviour on the LinkedIn blog.

Maybe it’s time I thought about the change to Facebook, all the cool kids seem to be on there, and this would never happen right!

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Nike+iPod Surveillance – could you become a target?

Now this is interesting reading, courtesy of Wired.It seems with a little know how the Nike+iPod training combo that folks raved about on it’s release could allow others invade your privacy, tracking every step you take. Could your habitual lunch time jog be plotted for the world to see?

Apparently the RFID signal output from the Nike shoe back to the widget in the Nano is too strong, recievable up to 60 feet away and is thereby interceptable to other receivers and hacked hardware.

The fact that the trend looks set to continue with more of this type of device appearing all the time as folks continually research ubiquitous computing ( chips in clothing etc) is a tad worrying.

In their report, the researchers detail a scenario in which a stalkerwho wants to know when his ex-girlfriend is at home taps into her Nike+iPod system. He simply hides the gumstix device next to her door, andit registers her presence as she passes by in her Nike shoes. If headds a small “wifistix” antenna to the device, it can transmit thisinformation to any nearby Wi-Fi access point and alert him to herpresence via SMS or by plotting her location on Google Maps.

Nike+iPod=Surveillance – Wired (Check out the images, just like something from Bond!)

technorati tags:Nike+iPod, Nike, iPod, Security, RFID, Reciever, Signal, Gumstix, Surveillance, Target, Privacy, EFF

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And you thought Windows was flawed…is this a record?

This week Apple released an OS update containing no less than 22 fixes, 12 of which were security holes. Is this some kind of record I wonder ? The fixes address hacks like buffer overflows and remote code execution, attack methods that we’ve seen long since patched again and again for Windows. It’s no different nor greater really is it ?

For more details on these vulnerabilities, check out the link below:

Apple patches 22 security holes in Mac OS X

technorati tags:Apple, Mac, vs, Windows, OS, security, patches, vulnerabilities, Vista, XP

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