People who spread malicious software via the web are smart. They are adept at watching the news, predicting search trends, and gaming search engines so that their malware infested pages can rank high for 'soon-to-be-popular' search terms. To do this, they use a variety of legitimate tools (such as Google's amazing Insights for Search tool) and a variety of 'black-hat' search tactics (such as paid links, building a group of interlinked pages, and injecting links on fraternity guest books).

Begrudging respect aside, V3.co.uk reported that cyber-criminals have begun targeting search terms related to the recent outbreak of wildfires in California. Think about this for a moment - people are interested in learning more about this major news story. They want to learn how to protect their homes, and they want to learn about how their friends and families are weathering this latest disaster. Isn't it sad that criminals choose to target these kinds of people?

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Despite Americans’ widespread adoption of e-commerce, sometimes there is no replacement for the personal touch.

According to an August 2009 survey conducted by Harris Interactive for human-assisted shopping site IMshopping, 77% of US Internet users who made an online purchase in the past six months would be interested in help from a real person before buying certain things on the Web.

Symantec came out with another very interesting piece of research last week. They published their "Dirtiest Web Sites of Summer 2009". These sites are the worst of the worst security offenders. Common threats include phishing attempts, malicious downloads, browser exploits and links to other unsafe sites.

On average, sites in this list contain an astounding 18,000 threats per site. Forty of the sites on this list have over 20,000 threats. And one particular offender has 23,414 serious security threats. And, finally, the Symantec list contains some information that will refute the notion that extremely dangerous sites are taken down quickly. It turns out that 3/4 of the sites on the list have been hosting threats for more than six months...

Last week, Cyveillance, a company which works in cyber intelligence, released another one of those truly chilling reports that cross my desk and compel me to write something in this blog. The "1H 2009 Cyber Intelligent Report" covered a number of interesting areas, but, perhaps the most interesting looked at how well security vendors are keeping up with the flood of malicious software that has been released.

If you follow this blog, you will know that I frequently write about how quickly malicious software has been growing. That alone is scary, but what will happen if security vendors cannot keep up? The Cyveillance report seems to suggest that security vendors are having trouble keeping up - if their numbers are to be believed, there could be dire times ahead.

The subject of social networking has come up several times on this blog. I have talked about how many researchers consider social networking to be one of the more vulnerable areas on the internet today (from a security perspective). I have also talked about some privacy concerns that affect social networking.

Today, I am going to cover a very interesting piece of research that was prepared by Joseph Bonneau and Sören Preibusch from the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. Entitled, "The Privacy Jungle: On the Market for Data Protection in Social Networks", this research took a sample of 45 social networking sites and analyzed each from a privacy perspective. This paper is relatively short and extraordinarily easy to read, so I suggest that you read the entire paper if you are interested in social networking and privacy.

More disturbing news came out of PandaLabs last week. According to their research, the number of computers infected with credential stealing malicious software has risen by 600% compared to this time last year! And, 71% of the new malicious software that PandaLabs receives are Trojans - and according to their press release, these are "mostly aimed at stealing bank details or credit card numbers."

In the press release promoting this research, Luis Corrons blamed the economic crisis and organized crime for this startling new trend. Mr. Corrons said, "this is in conjunction with organizations which have made a business out of selling personal information on the black market."