Google Threatens To Pull Out Of China

After cyber attacks on the gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists and other Chinese dissidents, Google has raised the stakes threatening to pull it's operations from China. The attacks were "very organized" and "clearly targeted" according to Google spokesman David Drummond, chief legal officer at Google.

Drummond Says that the means of the attack where not Google related but rather phishing schemes that obtained user information and originated in December from China. Being careful not to implicate the Chinese government Drummond says "we simply cannot continue to operate a filtered or censored search engine..."

Check out the CNBC interview.

McAfee Spam Expirement = 23,233 e-mails In One Month

In an experiment, McAfee invited 50 people from around the world to surf without spam filters. The results varied depending on where the surfer resided however I think you'll agree that even the least affected geographically still received a staggering amount of spam! Spam received by surfer by country (in one month):

US - 23,233

Brazil - 15,856

Italy - 15,610

Mexico - 12,229

UK - 11,965

Australia - 9,214

The Netherlands - 6,378

Spain - 5,419

France - 2,597

Germany - 2,331

"Many of our participants noticed that their computers were slowing down. This means that while they were surfing, unbeknownst to them, websites were installing malware," said Guy Roberts, director of McAfee's labs in Europe.

The future does not seem to hold any promise for eradicating spam either, "...it is such an immense problem and it's never going to go away. It's no longer a question of solving it but one of managing it," says Dave De Walt, chief executive of McAfee.

BBC story here.

Virtual theft nets real consequence

A 17 year old Dutch teen finds himself in hot water, having been arrested by police for theft of virtual items from other users of the social networking and gaming website Habbo Hotel. The teen is accused of stealing 4000 euros ($5700) worth of virtual furniture from other users, and since in game items are purchased with real money, the theft is being treated as it would in the real world. The crime was committed through a phishing type scheme where users were lured to fake websites where their user names and passwords where harvested. The CBC has more here.

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.

Monster of a hack

The BBC is running a story regarding an alleged hack of Monster.com that has resulted in the theft of hundreds of thousands of users data. Citing Symantec as the source of the article, BBC says that a computer program was used to hack the employer side of the job search site and to harvest data pertaining to user names, e-mail addresses, home addresses and phone numbers. There have apparently been reports of phishing e-mails sent out to Monster.com users, the e-mail encourages users to download a "Monster Job Seeker Tool", which in fact is a program that encrypts files on the victims computer and leaves a ransom note demanding money for their decryption. Be careful of those unsolicited e-mails, no matter how legitimate they sound!

Phishing for answers

Researchers at Indiana University are employing some questionable tactics in an attempt to understand how scammers succeed at duping people out of their personal information and why people are fooled by such scams. The experiment involves phishing for information from random unwilling participants and has raised the eyebrows of others who say the researchers are no better than the scammers themselves. The debate is an interesting one, can you actually get good results from such experiments if the subjects knew they were going to be phished or is there a better, more controlled way of conducting such experiment without duping people into participating? This Globe and Mail article has more.