TechBlog

Eric Jackson in Forbes Wrote: There are so many intriguing aspects of Marissa Mayer‘s hiring at Yahoo! (YHOO). However, what intrigues me the most is the what the future strategic direction of Yahoo! will be under her watch and what this means for the company’s future relationships with Google (GOOG) and Facebook(FB) (not to mention Microsoft(MSFT)). Presumably, Marissa already has the start of a strategic vision. And she said as much in a leaked memo yesterday: ...

Independent: If you’re a fan of fake Rolex watches and cheap Viagra look away now. A huge spam botnet responsible for an estimated 18 billion messages a day has been taken out by security researchers. The four year old botnet – known as Grum – is believed to have been responsible for around 18% of the world’s spam emails. A botnet is a cluster of infected computers used by cybercriminals to send a variety of spam emails – often offering cheap Viagra, fake watches or unusual dating solutions. ...

The Smoking Gun: Christina Aguilera contends that the recent hacking of her e-mail account had stripped her of a “feeling of security” that now “can never be given back,” according to a victim’s impact statement submitted to a U.S. District Court judge in Los Angeles. The singer’s statement was prepared in advance of the sentencing of Christopher Chaney, the Florida felon/online stalker who has pleaded guilty to illegally accessing the e-mail accounts of more than 50 victims (many of them Hollywood figures). ...

ZDNet: Indonesia’s communications and information ministry has shut down more than one million pornographic Web sites ahead of Islamic holy month of Ramadan commencing Jul. 19, according to a newswire. Observers of the Muslim month of fasting refrain from eating, drinking and sexual relations from dawn until sunset. All of the sites were reportedly outside the country and more will be clamped down this month, XBIZ newswire reported Wednesday. However, this does not mean that such sites will be allowed to operate during the rest of the year, Indonesia’s communication and information minister, Tifatul Sembiring said. ...

Mashable: Sophos’s NakedSecurity blog outlined the threat on Wednesday. The company’s SophosLabs intercepted a “spammed-out email campaign” which was designed to spread malware. Sophos provided the following example: The blog notes that the email address above misspells “Facebook” as “Faceboook.” The link takes the user to a malicious iFrame script, which exposes the user’s computer to malware. However, within four seconds, the user’s browser is directed to a presumably innocent Facebook page like the one below to act as a smokescreen. ...

H-Online: Spammers are currently sending large volumes of spam to users of cloud storage service provider Dropbox. The H’s associates at heise Security have so far received four different pieces of German-language spam at an email address used solely to register with Dropbox, and some of their readers have reported the same problem; similar reports can also be found on the Dropbox forums. In almost all cases, the spam is for suspicious-looking online casinos. ...

This article is copied from Softpedia: Researchers from Symantec, Kaspersky and Seculert **have all come across Madi (Madhi), a relatively new piece of malware that mainly targets organizations from the Middle East. ** Before we take a look at Madi and compare it to other infamous Trojans such as Stuxnet, Duqu, or Flame, let’s take a quick look at its name. According to Wikipedia, Mahdi is considered to be the redeemer of Islam who will rid the world of tyranny, injustice and wrongdoings. ...

Mozilla Firefox: Mozilla has released a new update for Firefox, Mozilla Firefox 14.0.1, This version comes with Google Secure search by default, flat buttons in toolbar and some Performance improvement and security fixes. Read more in Mozilla Blog. Mozilla Thunderbird: Mozilla also updated Thunderbird, Mozilla Thunderbird 14, This version mostly focus on stability, performance and security fixes. I think we cannot expect much more new feature in Thunderbird anymore, Mozilla has announced that they changed the way they develop Thunderbird, Read it yourself in Mozilla Blog. ...

TechChurch: Marissa Mayer, the technology executive who has worked at Google since the search company’s earliest days, has been appointed CEO of Yahoo. The news was first reported by the New York Times. The company has confirmed the appointment in a press release, which is embedded in full below. Mayer’s first day will be tomorrow, which is also when Yahoo’s next quarterly earnings call is slated to take place. Continue Reading Here: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/16/yahoo-marissa-mayer-ceo/ ...

Late last week, NVIDIA confirmed that the database for its forums web site had been broken into by unauthorized third parties, with data from more than 400,000 registered users affected. A hacker group calling itself “Team Apollo” has now claimed responsibility for the breach which caused NVIDIA to take the site down. As proof, they have published email addresses and password hashes for approximately 800 users from the database on Pastebin, with more, apparently, to follow. If the data proves to be genuine, NVIDIA’s statement that the password hashes were salted would be contradicted: the database excerpt includes the hash b018f55f348b0959333be092ba0b1f41 three times in the list, the result of md5('nvidia123'). ...