Web & SpamTitan Blog

Last week a top German court ruled that banks do not have to reimburse customers following  a phishing attack! On-line phishing scams are increasingly prevalent and increasingly sophisticated. Reports show that for the last three months of 2011 phishing attacks increased 25% with the number of brands scammers use as bait to trick users also increasing. Recent high profile phishing scams include fake Verizon bills via email, fake paypal payment confirmation emails and the enormous phishing scams spreading on the Chinese social network Weibo that saw thousands of victims affected.

Impressive growth in numbers using social networking.

We humans are certainly social creatures! There has been an explosive growth in the  numbers  of social media users in the past year with the three heavy hitters – Facebook, Twitter and Google+ – taking up most of the social media space. By any estimation it’s pretty impressive to see that Facebook has grown to over 800 million active users, adding more than 200 million in a single year. Twitter now has 100 million active users and LinkedIn has over 64 million users in the US (North America) alone. A new report from Palo Alto Networks indicates there has been “explosive growth” in global social networking and browser-based file sharing on corporate networks, with a 300% increase in active social networking in 2011 compared with activity during the same period in the latter half of 2010.

Heading to the 2012 London Olympics? Do you need a ticket?            

Cybercriminals are looking to capitalise on the growing interest and enthusiasm around the Olympic games with several phishing scams which aim to impersonate the Olympics official website or associated partners. The cyber criminals and malware writers know that just about any subject line with the word "Olympic" in it is likely  to be opened by a large proportion of recipients.

Most schools filter and manage internet access to protect students from inappropriate online  content, this filtering also ensures schools are complying with legislation for example in the US the Childrens Internet Protection Act. However, is the intention of Internet filters to protect students or the schools.?

For a cyber crime to count as a statistic, the crime has to be reported. Has your company  ever been the target of a phishing attack and not reported it? Because cybercriminals can launch coordinated attacks from all over the world catching them becomes more difficult as cyber crime continues to grow. Does a company have a legal obligation to come forward about cybercrime? Some consider that companies have ethical, civic and legal obligations to report cyber threats to authorities.

Do your employees have common sense when it comes to email & web security? The  best protection against malware, spam, hacker attacks, policy violations and other email and web threats is a layered set of defenses in which software, services, hardware and policies are used to protect data and other assets at the network, system and application levels. However, an obvious – but often-forgotten – layer in this cake of protection is the common sense of your users – one of the critical layers to prevent threats from gaining a foothold. As the picture says 'just because you can, doesn't mean you should', this is where common sense come into play.

Many SMBs believe that security problems are not of a sufficiently high priority to warrant doing anything about!

Many organizations believe they don’t have the IT budget to address many of the security problems they face, such as managing certificates, monitoring social media content, implementing data loss prevention systems that can check for intellectual property or sensitive information sent outside the company without encryption, or retaining content for the length of time required by statute or legal precedent.  The argument is that budget is simply not available or the problem is not of sufficiently high priority to warrant doing anything about it.

There are no silver bullets against security threats.

In folklore, silver bullets are the only ones supposed to be effective against witches and werewolves. Unfortunately for system administrators, silver bullets have never made it beyond the world of folklore. In particular, they do not exist to protect against security threats.

”Drive by” spam attacks are a growing business network security risk, affecting those who   open emails containing a malicious script that downloads malware to the user’s PC and ultimately infecting the company’s network. These emails don’t always include an attachment, some varieties are reported to be HTML-based and the script is activated once the email is opened.

Webroot reported to be exiting email security market - SpamTitan is ideal migration option

It was reported 2 months ago that Webroot may be exiting the email security market. Sources  suggest the vendor plans to stop supporting their email security products at the end of 2013. Following this announcement SpamTitan are speaking to existing customers about moving to SpamTitan anti spam for their email security requirements while also allowing them save on IT security budgets.