secure e-mail

Privacy-centric alternatives to Google, Gmail, and Facebook

The concern about Google, Facebook, and other popular Web services tracking their customers may have you wondering whether there are more-private alternatives. The Ixquick.com metasearcher, PrivacyHarbor.com and Hushmail e-mail services, and FolkDirect social network promise to stay out of your affairs.

Metasearch minus tracking and history Google lets you erase all or part of your Web history with five clicks: after you sign into your account, click the down arrow in the top-right menu, choose Account Settings, select Web History under "My products" (you may need to sign in again), click Clear entire Web History, and … Read more

Epsilon partner warned of phishing attacks months ago

The recent data breach reported by e-mail marketing service provider Epsilon that exposed names and e-mail addresses for customers at dozens of companies comes four months after an Epsilon technology partner warned about targeted phishing attacks on e-mail service providers and on its own network.

Return Path said in late November that thousands of e-mail addresses had been stolen from its system after one of its employees clicked on a link in a phishing e-mail message. Epsilon uses Return Path's e-mail monitoring technology in the e-mail marketing services it provides to other companies.

"The employee's system was … Read more

Fake Facebook e-mail contains Trojan

A new variant of the Bredolab Trojan horse is attached to a fake "Facebook Password Reset Confirmation" e-mail, security firm MX Labs is reporting.

Some users are receiving the e-mail from "The Facebook Team," according to the security firm. The sender's e-mail address displays "service@facebook.com." In reality, the address and sender were spoofed.

MX Labs found that the e-mail was accompanied by an attachment named, "Facebook_Password_4cf91.zip and includes the file Facebook_Password_4cf91.exe" that, the e-mail claims, contains the user's new Facebook password. The security firm said that … Read more

Storm worm version uses China earthquake to lure victims

If you want information about the earthquake in China get it from a news site and not from a link to a video that arrives in your e-mail inbox.

That's the message from the US-CERT (Computer Emergency Readiness Team) on Thursday.

The group has received reports of a new variant of the Storm worm that targets people interested in the May 12 earthquake that killed nearly 70,000 people and left 5 million homeless. Some of the e-mails also have subject lines that deal with the Olympic Games that China is hosting.

In the e-mail is a link that … Read more

Large companies paying workers to read employee e-mail

If you were thinking of using your work e-mail for job hunting or online dating, think twice.

A new survey finds that 41 percent of large companies (those with 20,000 or more employees) are paying staffers to read or otherwise analyze the contents of employees' outbound e-mail.

In the study, which was commissioned by e-mail security provider Proofpoint and conducted by Forrester Research, 44 percent of the companies surveyed said they investigated an e-mail leak of confidential data in the past year and 26 percent said they fired an employee for violating e-mail policies, according to security portal Help Net Security. … Read more

White House loses e-mail during 'upgrade,' gets sued

As part of the Bush administration's post-Clinton cleaning house efforts, the White House replaced its Lotus Notes e-mail system with Microsoft's Outlook and Exchange. Compatibility issues broke the automated archiving system and e-mails were lost.

No problem, Bush and Co. said and decided to have employees save files by hand. That's despite the fact that doing it manually is not a reliable or even tamper-proof way of dealing with important government communications that are required by law to be carefully archived.

Subsequent efforts to retrofit the old Lotus Notes-based archiving system to work with the new system … Read more

Spam continues to increase, Symantec says

Spam now accounts for 78.5 percent of all e-mail traffic, according to a new report from Symantec. That's up from previous months. And Europe, not the United States, can now claim to be the source of most spam.

Other notable points culled from the "State of Spam" report for February 2008 (PDF) include:

There was an appreciable decline of image spam during January 2008. The overall file size of spam messages has also decreased. Product spam, the largest category, makes up 28 percent of all spam. Internet Web hosting and Web design spam makes up 23 … Read more

Google offers security and compliance services for any e-mail system

Google is using its Postini acquisition to offer security features for any e-mail system.

The company is set to launch several new security products on Tuesday that are part of its Google Apps platform but are targeted at organizations that aren't using Gmail and other Web-hosted applications from Google.

The Powered by Postini services are message filtering with spam and malware filtering, for $3 per user per year; message filtering plus enhanced virus detection, content policy management, and other support to stop e-mail data leaks, for $12 per user per year; and message discovery, which adds one year of … Read more