March 2011

The Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), founded in 2003, is a global industry, law enforcement, and government coalition focused on eliminating the identity theft and fraud that result from the growing problem of phishing, email spoofing, and crimeware.

In the context of network security, a spoofing attack is a situation in which one person or program successfully masquerades as another by falsifying data and thereby gaining an illegitimate advantage.

A study based on a survey of more than 10,000 information security professionals, worldwide finds that a growing number of technologies being widely adopted by businesses are challenging information security executives and their staff, potentially endangering the security of government agencies, corporations and consumers worldwide over the next several years.

When it comes to browsing the Internet, women in Asia tend to put safety first (78 percent), while their male counterparts choose speed above all else (83 percent).

Businesses will struggle to keep up with the growing list of threats such as cyber espionage unless they adopt a different approach to tackling them, according to Ovum.

Yahoo! Inc. and Nielsen have announced the launch of Brand Impact, a study aimed at quantifying the branding effectiveness of online advertising campaigns across Asia.

Microsoft Corp. launched this month their latest version of Windows Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) in 40 languages and this has been the company’s most-downloaded browser beta of all time, with more than 36 million downloads around the world.

Mobile phones with built-in office and Internet functions, so-called smart phones, are starting to become omnipresent and consequently will inspire more and more hackers and virus writers to come up with ideas, especially since these end devices, like PCs, have many security gaps.

Working with smartphones to access important data or to interact quickly with colleagues is already a quite common business practice as this enables higher productivity.

I just read a comprehensive article written by Markus Hennig, Chief Technology Officer at Astaro, on how to avoid Internet security holes and would like to share with you his key points.