While I have been following online scams for quite awhile, every once in a while, I read about one that makes my blood boil. Yesterday, I heard about a phishing scam that made me pretty angry and today, I got enough confirmation to write an article about it.

There is a phishing email going around right now that says that people who were vaccinated against H1N1 have to go to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) web site to create a "Personal H1N1 Vaccination Profile". And, when people click on the link to create their profile, they are directed to a site which will steal their personal health information and (in some cases) try to infect their computers with malicious software.

Coremetrics, the web site sales tracking firm, announced some exciting numbers from Cyber Monday 2009. According to their numbers, consumers bought 30% more items on Cyber Monday 2009 than on Cyber Monday 2008! Moreover, total sales were up 13.7% when compared to 2008.

These are some incredibly encouraging numbers from the world of online retailing. However, not all of Coremetrics numbers were quite so good. One particularly important metric (shopping cart conversions) was 3.11% lower than in 2008. And both sports retailers and department stores saw their average order volume drop when compared to Cyber Monday 2008.

And here is how the wise guys changed the ComatOSe:

And then they asked all Cybera people not to use it! Why? Because the ugly Googa monster was so strong that he could break any "encrypt" function and he could also filter any noise added. Not mentioning he could monitor all the onion activities too!

The news team over at CBS2 in Utah put SmartSwipe to the test to see if their 'hacker' can steal credit card information while the shopper is using SmartSwipe.

Here is what they found:

Internet security news can often be rather bleak and depressing, but every once in awhile, you come across a truly funny news article. CNet came out with an article a couple of days ago that made me laugh/shake my head and I would like to share it with all of you.

A Masters of Fine Arts student named Zach Gage came up with an interesting idea for his thesis. So, he programmed a game that runs on MacIntosh computers. Resembling Space Invaders (Space Invaders gave an entire generation carpal tunnel syndrome), Gage's project has a twist - every time you destroy an alien ship, Zach's game deletes a random file on your computer. Gage is incredibly upfront about this - his web site warns you that you will permanently lose data and the game also warns you of this when you start it!