Aunty has a firm belief that anybody who has a vested interest in charging money for keeping you safe from harm is likely to have a vested interest in perpetuating the threat of that harm – otherwise they run the risk of becoming obsolete when that harm is no longer….

Verizon has been in the news quite a bit lately, and indeed here in Aunty’s own column, for its dunderheaded refusal of email from large chunks of the civilized world, by blocking incoming email from entire countries. In fact, Verizon is being sued by their users who have been unable…

The security hole on which Aunty reported last week, in the processing of PNG graphic files by MSN Messenger and other Windows programs, has moved Microsoft to require that users of their MSN Messenger upgrade before being allowed back on to the Messenger network. According to a report on CNET’s…

Panda Software has announced that it has discovered a serious, and seriously exploitable, vulnerability in the way that a certain type of graphics files, PNG files, are processed and displayed by programs including Windows Media Player, Windows Messenger, and MSN Messenger. The vulnerability is such that malicious code inserted into…

A serious security flaw has hit several Symantec security products, many of which are in widespread use, says the company. The vulnerability is serious enough to have been been classified as “high risk”. According to the Symantec site, the vulnerable component “fails to do proper bounds checks when analyzing certain…

Dear Gentle Readers, For those of you who have been listening at home (and those of you who haven’t, you should be!), our regular weekly date with the extremely funny, bright, and erudite David Lawrence, of Online Tonight with David Lawrence, has been moved from Wednesday evenings to Thursday evenings,…

ISP giant Microsoft, and pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, have (finally!) teamed up to deliver a one-two punch to those legion of Viagra spammers who are the scourge of the Internet. We have been saying for ages that Pfizer needed to get involved, as in addition to the anti-spamming laws available these…

Here’s an interesting scenario: Someone somehow manages to get your credit card number (of course you would never fall for a phisher’s bait… your virus, spyware and firewall software are all up-to-date… you don’t leave your card lying around… and who uses paper credit card transaction receipts any more to…

Security firm Sophos is reporting today that a new spyware Trojan, BankAsh-A, is specifically targeting Microsoft’s new anti-spyware, and very effectively so, it would seem. Once having disabled the anti-spyware, it sets about stealing passwords and other vital information, which it reports back to the mothership via ftp, and keeps…

Email management firm Email Systems is reporting that porn spam is on the rise again, rising from a relatively flaccid 7% to a turgid 21% of all spam in just the past month. Unfortunately without knowing how they are defining “porn”, it’s impossible to really get a complete picture as…

And here Aunty thought that public school education in our country had gone down hill. Apparently our public schools are in fact turning out students well-suited to the demands of the next generation of technologists – or a life of crime. A sixteen-year-old high school student in Fort Bend, Texas,…

Here’s an interesting angle to the proliferation of online “pharmacies” – you know those places which have a doctor “on staff”, so you can contact them, get a prescription for the medication of your choice, and then purchase said medication from them.

Yesterday Aunty wrote to tell you about the Mugu Marauder, a new “art project” by an organization calling themselves “Artists Against 419”. The project has participants link to images from 419 scammer’s websites and display them on the participant’s own website, causing the displayed images to eat into the scammer’s…

A group calling themselves “Artists Against 419” are asking Windows users to take part in their Mugu Marauder “art” project and take down the scam sites hosted by so-called “419 scammers”. The “Mugu” in “Mugu Marauder” apparently is the term which the 419 scammers themselves use for an intended victim…

You know, for a law which people with no legal clue, but a lot of public mouth, continue to claim has been a miserable failure, ISPs like AOL, Microsoft, and Earthlink sure are getting a lot of mileage out of CAN-SPAM. In fact, Earthlink just announced today that is has…