Gary Eckstein

Almost everyone is affected with email spam. Spam detectors / email filters have improved substantially over the past few years but unfortunately the skills of the spammers have also improved. It is not just businesses involved in the fight against spammers but also governments; The Australian government, for example, is taking spamming and the negative consequences very seriously.

Beyond email there is another very relevant form of spamming; comment and trackback spamming. This form of spamming affects the millions of blogs on the Internet. Most blog posts are open for comments. This means that people are able to comment on the content of the post (look below this post and post a comment if you so wish). Whether using Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, TypePad, Blogger or Read the rest of this entry »

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Two eye opening reports have been published recently. Both deal with what has been termed Ghostnet which has been discovered in tracking the infiltration of Tibetan computer networks. The two reports are: ‘Tracking GhostNet’ (University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies and The SecDev Group) and ‘The Snooping Dragon: social-malware surveillance of the Tibetan movement’ (University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory) – see the end of this post for a copy of this report.

The reports bring to light just how simply computer networks may be compromised and just how much damage may be done by such attacks. Neither reports are able to identify the originators of GhostNet but both name the Chinese Government as the potential aggressors. Potentially even more worrying Read the rest of this entry »

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In the past week ShareThis has released data showing their most popular Sharing Services during January 2009. The data are illustrated below in the chart provided by ShareThis. The results are likely an accurate reflection of the various sharing services popularity on the web as a whole as ShareThis is extremely popular:

• Email is by far most popular sharing service getting 57%.
• Facebook is the second most popular sharing service at 21%
• Digg has dropped significantly in popularity to 2%

AddThis used to provide similar data but unfortunately has ceased to provide this information. Thanks to Read the rest of this entry »

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