Today the BBC has reported that consumer protection laws are being exploited by some online ticket sales companies. There is a new ticket scam that is on the increase at the moment, however it is doing the old trick of taking money from customers credit cards but never sending any tickets. It is estimated that the scam…
Internet Security
PC Support Security Scams – ZFSENDTOTARGET CLSID Trick
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Had another call today from a firm telling me that my computer was generating errors caused by malware, which was caused because my security warranty was out of date. I had a similar call the other day, and knowing it to be a scam I got rid of them pretty quickly. Today I decided to…
Preview Short URLs Before Clicking – Works with TinyUrl and the Rest!
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I just got an email and the person sending it was promoting (spamming) a product but I was curious about what it was. After my recent virus after opening a Google Alert email I did not want to look at the URL direct, so I Googled a solution How To View TinyURL’s Without Visiting the…
I Caught a Virus! Rogue.SecurityTool and Spyware.iemonster – Grain on WordPress May Have Security Holes
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Last night I received a Google Alert for one of my websites. For those that do not know what this means, Google Alerts is a service that Google provide for free which will send you an email whenever a word or phrase appears to them for the first time. Google Alerts is handy for research…
Facebook Candid Camera Messages Spreading Virus
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My Dad called me today to say that he had a problem with his PC. A rogue anti-virus got installed on his PC and has hijacked it. He is running McAfee AV but that failed to stop it, although he did admit that he saw warnings, but really thought at the time that the virus…
McAfee Security Update Breaks Windows
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Last night Ant-Virus software McAfee released a security update that broke Windows. The AV mistakenly thought that part of the Windows operating system is a virus, so locked it down. This resulted in computers being unable to boot up. So what exactly happened? McAfee’s 5958 update wrongly identified the Windows svchost.exe file as the wecorl.a…
How to Disguise Your Email Address – Email Obfuscation
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Spam is a horrible thing. It is probably what annoys people the most about the internet. And for webmasters, owners / managers of websites, email spam can be horrific. For years spammers have been building “bots” that crawl the internet and seek out email addresses. As many people rely on email for their online business,…
Conficker Virus Starts Installing Mystery Software
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There is currently a major PC virus attack in progress, which is affecting millions of PC’s, and mostly is going unnoticed by home computer owners that do not follow PC security news, or run AV software. The virus is called Conflicker, and appeared in October 2008. All the major AV houses spotted it and informed…
Dixons, Currys and PC World Websits are all Down!
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Today a major UK retail chain has lost all internet visibility. All of DSG International’s online stores are currently off-line! The websites for Dixons, Currys and PC World have all been offline for most of the day today. The message on each website states that “We’re reall sorry, our website is not available at this…
Domain Name Phishing Alert
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We received an email today stating that our domain was being cancelled as the WHOIS information was not correct. Here is a except of the email: On Sat, 1 Nov 2008 08:04:38 +0200 we received a third party complaint of invalid domain contact information in the Whois database for this domain. Whenever we receive a…
Attack of the Zombies and the Shadowserver Foundation
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OK, this sounds like a 70’s horror movie, but it is actually one of the greatest threats currently to online security. It is estimated that there are now about 300,000 zombie computers operating. These are computers that have been taken over by hackers and are being used to send spam, or infect other machines with…
How To Reduce Email Spam
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If you are receiving a lot of spam mail, then your name could be to blame. Research by Cambridge University has shown that spammers tend to target email addresses that start with the letters A, M or S. So Andrews, Mandy’s and Simons will on average receive more spam that Quentins and Karls. In the…