More worms & phishing

Things just got a little worse, again. Getting a bogus corporate email
that your Citibank / Ebay / Paypal / … account has expired / been compromised
/ … with the kind request to update them; is one thing.

Enter
SEPUC: You receive a blank email with hidden
code that downloads & installs pieces of code on your system which build a
keylogger Trojan that transmits your sensitive data nicely back out. Nice! Thing
is we had more than a few of those in the past week.

Oh, have you
heard about the new SASSER? It’s a worm that hits a vulnerable
machine, scans the internet for more vulnerable machines, forwards itself
without user intervention onto that machine through a windows security hole and
then it continues from there. No email involved!

Why again do I
like using Mac OS X on my primary machine? No, it’s not for some of the
features it’s lacking ;) With increasing frequency we find ourselves on the
front line, before certain patches and updates have been released. Even with the
right tools the security side is a time consuming stressful side effect of
Windows computing. I’m starting to see Mac OS X running on C’s desk in the near
future (even though her incredimail email client has no Mac
brother/sister).

Apple released a small security update. Time for software
update.

PS: You’ll note that QuickTime 6.5.1 appears in the list as
well. It has a new lossless audio codec, improved AAC encoding, improved support
for iTunes.

Apple’s iBook logic board repair program now covers May 2002 till October 2003.

iTunes
4.5 for both OS X & Windows systems, with new features like WMA
import, iMix, Party Shuffle, CD inserts, …

If you are using iBlog, then Paul Baily’s iBlog
Backup is likely THE must have tool.

It automates backing
up and restoring your iBlog data and preferences into a few clicks process. I
helped a little testdriving it, and it’s really a handy tool. No need to
struggle with the finder, iBlog Backup will do it for you.

So, don’t
risk losing your entire blog, … keep a compressed backup around which is just
as easily restored as it was backed up.

Now, that could be a while! Good thing they let us off the plane at the
airport :) The Dutch flight hostess uses the train a lot, I suppose ;)

Anyway, we’re back, safe and well. It was a nice, but short trip. As
you know, I’m sure, 6 days fly by. Sightseeing & photography was limited
because of some obligations, but you can look forward to some new photos.