A new phishing tactic discovered by Internet security company SurfControl allows the phisher to take advantage of a weakness in a targeted company’s website, permitting them to use the company’s real URL, while serving up bogus look-alike content. According to Susan Larson of SurfControl, “This is definitely one of the…

As more and more users renounce the security-risk beleagured Internet Explorer, and move to open source web browsers such as Firefox, Microsoft is starting to feel the pinch. As a result, Explorer has slipped from a previous lofty 95% marketshare to below 93%. While this may seem like a tiny…

The Chicago Sun-Times is reporting that Motorola has just filed a patent on what has got to be the ultimate pay-per-click mechanism: beaming advertisements to celphones and then using geolocation to track when the celphone user has walked into an advertised merchant’s store, at which point the advertiser will be…

Looking for a way to earn some spare cash for the holidays? Well, if you’re in the U.K., and know of a company who is using pirated, unlicensed, or otherwise illegal software, you’re in luck. Just turn the company in to the Business Software Alliance (BSA), and they will pay…

Dear Gentle Readers, Aunty recently became aware that some users are complaining that cookies are spyware, and accusing cookie-leaving companies of infecting their computers with spyware. This happened most recently to the people over at Pocket PC Thoughts, where users’ anti-spyware programs were detecting cookies set by Pocket PC Thoughts’…

If you are one of the thousands of users who uses a challenge/response system to stem the flow of email into your inbox, you may be missing out on more than just spam. One of the inherent flaws in challenge/response systems is that they don’t work if the sender never…

Dear Gentle Readers, MSNBC, of all places, is reporting that there are allegations that Microsoft CEO Steven Ballmer has been spamming people. :gasp: Can it be true? Microsoft has been in the news a lot lately as a champion of anti-spam, suing spammers in Federal court left and right. To…

As Aunty reported back in October, Microsoft reintroduced its roundly rejected Sender I.D. proposal, after, it says, reworking it a bit to meet some of the objections which did it in the first time. And true, to their credit, they did address at least one of the technical concerns. However…

As many of you may already know, the Federal Trade Commission has been charged with looking at, among other things, sender authentication. This is important because when certain sorts of email marketers send out their “permission based email marketing”, for some reason they don’t actually send it from their own…

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. If that’s true, then the Recording Industry Association of America should be very flattered, as the Motion Picture Assocation is following suit (pun intended). And certainly this will make a criminal lawyer or two happy. Undaunted by a recent Federal…

The Hormel corporation, long tolerant of its trademark “spam” being used to mean junk email, has decided that they have had enough, and are ready to reclaim their rightful place as The Spam People. As part of their initiative, they will be launching a multi-part ad campaign in the UK,…

Blogs became a front-running source of information during Tuesday’s election, as millions flocked to political blogs to get a taste of early exit poll numbers, available on blogs often hours before the more traditional news media doled them out. Nevermind that early can also mean unchecked, or in some cases…

British security firm Mi2g has, after an intensive year-long study, named Apple OS X and Open Source BSD as the most secure and resistant to security breach operating systems one can use in a 24/7 computing environment. The study of more than 235,000 computer systems world-wide included everything from personal…

Dear Readers, As reported here by Aunty just days ago, there is a vulnerability in Microsoft Internet Explorer which allows bad people to make you think that you are clicking on a link for one site, and then redirecting you to another site altogether. As an example, Aunty even spoofed…

Dear Gentle Readers, Aunty has just become aware of a brand new scam-by-spam. The spam tells readers that it has been sent by “an official anti-spam corporation”, that has determined that your email address has been included in several spam mailings, and that they “control those junk mail databases and…