“After years of boasting about the Mac’s near invincibility, Apple is now advising its customers to install security software on their computers. Apple — which has continually played on Windows’ vulnerability to viruses in its advertising campaigns — issued the advice in a low-key message on its support forums. ‘Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple antivirus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult.’ It goes on to recommend a handful of products.”

Does Secrecy Help Protect Personal Information?

Symantec says that in the second half of 2006 some 6m computers around the world were infected by “bots” (robotic pieces of malicious software), 29% up on the previous six months. Four out of five of them had been attacked by Trojan horses that sniffed out confidential information by logging keystrokes, recording internet sites visited, and reporting the findings to a third party. Other unsuspecting users were redirected to fake websites where they were fooled by phishing scams into parting with their identity details.

Just make sure nobody is sniffing packets across your network, before you test all your most secret passwords.

Choosing Secure Passwords

This sample script once proudly displayed the visitors contact list if they were logged into their Google account. Only hours after it was reported to the Google security team, the vulnerability was fixed.

That was quick. I hope it’s true.

Like your Gmail account? Consider it a sacred place which must be protected from spammers at all cost? Yeah, us too. Well, we hate to break the bad news at the dawn of the new year but there’s a weakness in Gmail which exposes your email address to any web site capable of exploiting the bug. As reported on Digg, the exploit takes advantage of the fact that Google puts your details into a JS file. As a result, if you’re logged into Gmail and browsing the web, any rogue website can declare the function “google” and then parse all your contacts.