Earlier this evening I was working on a few blog posts for my boss, minding my own business. I was in what I jokingly refer to as my zone. When I’m writing, it’s actually hard to distract me. You have to yell at me, or poke me repeatedly. I’ve gotten quite good at blocking things out when I’m writing. I’ve had to do that being a work-at-home Mom. It’s not easy to get anything done if you hear every sound coming out of your teenager’s bedroom!

As I sat there writing, my zone was shattered by the yells from my daughter. She was screaming for me to “Hurry! Help me!”. Thinking for sure something horrible had happened, I nearly killed myself getting out of my chair and into her room. I crossed the doorway to see her pointing at her laptop with a completely horrified look on her face. I look down, knowing already what I would see, and sighed heavily. You guessed it… popups… of the adult variety. Great. Just lovely!

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Christmas. Hannukah. Yule. Kwanzaa. Festivus!

No matter what holiday you celebrate during this time of year, we would like to wish you and yours a very happy, healthy and safe holiday season. Even if you choose not to celebrate anything in particular, we still extend our warmest wishes as we look towards a new – and hopefully better for all – new year.

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I was without power for most of the afternoon and evening today. When the power company had everything fixed, the first thing I did was to head over to Twitter to see what I had missed. That’s honestly where I find out most of my news lately. On Twitter, I follow a lot of different people. Many of those are staff members and experts right here on GeeksToGo, as well as other security-related sites.

As soon as my Twitter homepage loaded, I started seeing tweet after tweet talking about Avast, and their horrible “oopsie” today with updates. Being the person I am, I started nosing around the web, trying to find out more. The more I read, the more disturbed and angry I became.

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Earlier this evening, I received an email from my sister. It was a forwarded email, with her words of “warning and caution” at the beginning. She went so far as to say something along the line of how everyone better be extra vigilant. She stated that people need to “be fearful” these days when it comes to malware.

The email detailed a supposedly horrible “new” piece of malware, which had been classified by Microsoft as the “worst ever”. I knew, before checking into it, that this was absolutely false. However, being the person that I am, I did my research. I did a “reply all” on the email and explained to everyone what my credentials are. I then gave them several REAL links that describe this virus in detail. The email discussed the “postcard virus”, which is actually quite old – and not as harmful as the email would have you believe.

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Everywhere I turned online yesterday, there was conversation surrounding the Malwarebytes blog post, in which they have very publicly accused IObit of stealing their proprietary database(s). It’s being talked about in blogs, on forums, via newsletters and news sites, and within private mailing lists. People chatted about this on IRC, and fights were instigated on various forums as to the validity of the claim.

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I am a moderator in a chat room that has around 250+ active users at all times – day or night. The chat mostly centers around technology, social media, and anything that could be considered to be “Geeky”. Several times a day – EVERY day – the talk turns to computer security. And always, some dolt makes a claim of how smart they are on the Internet… how they don’t need protection… how they couldn’t possibly become infected.

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The first thing that comes to mind upon hearing the word spam, for most people, is an email advertising certain enhancements to the male body, not the cheap pork brand – which is actually the source of the word. This is not surprising: in 2006, 40% of all e-mails sent – 12 billion per day – were classified as spam emails, and that figure continues to grow constantly as spam vendors evolve and develop their spamming practices.

Many people have had their personal email boxes completely flooded with spam emails – but just how massive is this phenomenon is in real life, for a real person? What websites send the most spam? How do your actions influence the amount of spam sent? Finding answers to these is just the purpose of the recent McAfee research, the results of which have been posted last June. McAfee took spam surveys on a whole new level. 50 volunteers from around the world have been given a computer and email accounts and participated in this research, creatively named Spammed Persistently All Month (SPAM). They have been asked to submit their email addresses to as many websites as possible, including ‘get rich quick’ plans, ‘work from home’ websites, ad clicking websites, and free giveaways: iPods, vacations, etc., and similar.

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