1.3 Million Monster.com users have personal data stolen

In this CBC article Monster.com is said to have confirmed that 1.3 million users had their personal information stolen in the attack reported by Symantec Corp. last week. A security notice published on the Monster.ca site says "Fortunately, we have been able to identify and shut down the source of the software. By gaining unauthorized access to employer accounts, the software was obtaining job seeker contact information. The information obtained was limited to the names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of job seekers primarily located in the United States. The purpose of gathering this information appears to be sending email disguised as Monster in order to gain recipients' trust, and then attempting to convince users to engage in financial transactions, or lure them into downloading malicious software." They further go on to encourage you to be careful about e-mails that appear to be from the company and ask you to download software or update account information... good advise any time.

Google educating advertisers

Google is trying to keep it's AdWords customers informed about click-fraud a practice that involves fraudulent clicks on Google's AdSense network aimed at increasing revenues for a site or costing competitors money by clicking on their ads. Google's "Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center" contains content meant to educate advertisers and keep them up to date on fraud detection and fraudulent practices. Google does not pay sites to display their ads, but rather site owners are paid for clicks on the ad and some have resorted to creating software agents that automate these clicks, either on their sites or on ads of competitors, for the reasons mentioned above. Inforworld story here.

Where's Willy?

How geeky is this? I was trying to decide between a number of topic ideas that I have been bouncing around when a new one came to me, straight out of the bank machine. April is tax time here, and since I was expecting a return I e-filed early. Today I was in the city and on a whim decided to check my account at the ATM to see if the deposit had been made yet. Since it had (cha-ching) I withdrew a few dollars before heading to the big box electronics shop.

One of the bills had hand writing on it which caught my eye. Normally I would ignore such markings but this one jumped out at me. Neatly printed on the bill was "Follow my journey - online! www.whereswilly.com"URL and the bill's serial number was circled. With an like that I was a little concerned that the link might take me to a site of questionable content, but curiosity got the better of me.

Much to my joy the site actually allows you to trace the wanderings of your money before it reached your hands and, if you play along, after it's long spent. I've seen similar sites such as http://www.bookcrossing.com/ which is a free book club that allows you to track the travels of books that you've read. The idea is to leave the book in a public place with directions to their site for journaling it's travels. The really geeky part of this story however is what happened when I was putting this post together. Without really thinking much about it, I decided to scan the bill and post the image with the article. My trusty HP Officejet 6210 All-in-One gladly complied but when I tried to save the image to jpeg format, using Paint Shop Pro, I received the following message: "This application does not support the unauthorized processing of banknote images. For more information, select the information button below for Internet-based information on restrictions for copying and distributing banknote images or go to www.rulesforuse.org.".

rulesforuse.org provides guidelines for the use of images of currency and links to the appropriate governing bodies, according to where you live. I hope the Bank of Canada will approve of my alterations to the image included herein, in the interest of time I've done my best to render the image unusable for nefarious purposes... though I haven't requested the appropriate permission, yet!