Author Archives: mike

Probably more amusing than useful, this table by Sophos is a table of where spam is inserted into the Internet mail system. This is not quite the same as where the spam comes from, because most spam is distributed via an … Continue reading →

The Register reports today that the Japanese government has mistakenly left at least one Google Group open to the world to read where they discussed “secret” government work. Or more seriously, discussed the details of numerous people within the group. … Continue reading →

Once a machine has been infected with some form of malware, of the most urgent steps is to disinfect that machine so it can be put back to use. Safely. Unfortunately this is not as easy as it may well … Continue reading →

The full story:- http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/23/hacked_ap_tweet_dow_decline/ But basically what happened here is that the Associated Press twitter account(s) had weak passwords, and the “hackers” found out what the passwords were and used that knowledge to post a fake announcement. We can blame … Continue reading →

One of the things we get asked about the most is spam (not SPAM!) where somebody has been sent some sort of junk email. Spammers are learning a trick from phishing attacks – not surprisingly as spammers send out email-based phishing attacks … Continue reading →

As the subject suggests … if you want to ask us questions, please do so! Specifically for suggesting new topics for this blog, but any questions would be appreciated and answered. Either here or as an individual reply. There is … Continue reading →

The following video is a vendor trying to sell something :- httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jooV0HG01wg The mechanism itself can be provided using a standard DNS infrastructure using the RPZ feature; the difficult part is the “Malware Data Feed” as this needs a high … Continue reading →

Windows (and OSX) make it quite easy to share directories and files with other people on the same network. Which is all very well, but if you move to a different network those shares may no longer be appropriate. As … Continue reading →

One of the very first things that is mentioned on any course on penetration testing (or related fields) is that any use of “hacking” tools is dangerous. Even if it is your job to look for security holes, you really need … Continue reading →

We have been alerted by JANET CSIRT (who are the security people at what is effectively our ISP) that a number of incidents have occurred over the last few weeks indicating that people at academic institutions have been sharing or encouraging the … Continue reading →