The Weekly Geek

I advise people using loaned computers to always assume there is some sort of spyware planted.
The recent flap over a Pennsylvania school district’s use of tracking software on schoolissued laptops, supposedly to locate those that were stolen, makes me wonder how much illegal snooping goes on everywhere, whether initially intended or not.
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It was bound to happen: on-demand, web-based fraud that mirrors the efficiency, sophistication, and universality of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
In his recent white paper, entitled “Fraud Trends in 2010,” Rick Van Luvender, Director of First Data’s InfoSec Incident Response Center, has forever characterized this thriving underground economy as Fraud-as-a-Service, or FaaS.

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It took a while for me to confirm this, McAfee claims it will reimburse users whose computers had to be serviced due to a faulty update it issued last week that caused people’s computers to act all wacky. We had a few show up at our shop and it took some major surgery to get them [...]

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The Internet Crime Complaint Center is reporting that last year the business model of scareware and my term crapware reached $150 Million in the US last year. http://www.ic3.gov/media/2009/091211.aspx
Symantec published a report in October of 2009 reporting 40 million infected users worldwide. http://eval.symantec.com/mktginfo/enterprise/white_papers/b-symc_report_on_rogue_security_software_WP_20100385.en-us.pdf
As Scareware continues to proliferate via Facebook, with the deaths or misfortunes of celebrities, [...]

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It has happened again, another attack / exploit on Adobe Acrobat, all versions (including the free Reader and paid for versions). There is no patch at this time but there is a quick fix. Before we go any further, here is the fix.
Open Adobe Acrobat, go to “Edit” on the menu bar (2nd from the [...]

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