Making Millions With Scareware

Oct 9, 2011 | security

If you’ve ever wondered what motivates the creators of malware, you should read a fascinating article by Benjamin Wallace over at Wired.com, “How Two Scammers Built An Empire Hawking Sketchy Software.” It’s the story of a couple of run-of-the-mill scam artists who...

Anatomy Of A Scam Investigation

Sep 18, 2011 | business, law, security

There is a fascinating and informative series of articles by a lawyer and former federal prosecutor about his efforts to unearth information about a scammer who sent a phony “invoice” to his firm. It’s a well-known and simple scam – send something that looks like an...

Sudden Decline In Fake Antivirus Malware

Aug 30, 2011 | security

The world has made a bit of temporary progress against the bad guys. Almost every week during 2010 and the first six months of 2011, I cleaned malware off computers after it was installed by poisoned web sites. It usually started with a window designed to resemble a...

Apple Responds To “MacDefender” Malware

May 24, 2011 | Apple, Microsoft, security

For years, Windows users have felt persecuted by malware authors. Why weren’t Macs getting hit with viruses and poisoned web sites? The standard wisdom was that Macs didn’t have a big enough market share to hold the interest of the bad guys. To be honest, PC users...

Windows 7 Is Safer Than Windows XP

May 23, 2011 | Microsoft, security, Vista, Windows7, WinXP

Previously: Say Goodbye To Six Year Old Computers Windows XP computers are falling over left and right. Many of them are simply insufferably slow for all the reasons I wrote about last fall. Windows XP is a much heavier, slower OS than when it was first released, and...