Cloud Hosting & Cloud Computing Blog

This month, McAfee have come out with an interesting report on the Online Security Threats. It is an appealing read for anybody interested in the security phase.There seems to be nothing remarkably different from popular understanding, but there are some interesting facts and figures worth reading. A few highlights, which caught my attention, are following.

Global Recession in spamming Trends: The overall spamming activity has drastically reduced in last two quarters. It looks like global recession has exaggerated the spamming industry as well. For the first time in last several quarters, spam as a percentage of total emails sent, has come down below 90%.

But actually, it is the result of the shut down of one of the major spamming network with the name McColo in last November. Let’s see how things steps forward in remaining quarters of 2009.

There is a great jump in the activities of Rogue applications. This seems to be the new area, which is getting good growth.

March saw record time growth for the launching of new rogue applications and witnessed more than double number of these apps as contrast to any single month in last many years.

Which Country Hosts the most BAD URLs:

Many people point the finger at countries like, China, Russia, Ukrain and other East European countries to be the root of evil, where most of the malware are fabricated and foster but on the contrary to popular belief, US accounts for almost half of all the BAD URL. This may be due to the popularity of Internet in US, but it is high time that we stop accusing of other countries for all bad things.

Drugs Continues to be the Top Reason behind Spam:

Male enhancement drugs such as Viagra and diet pills and other prescription drug, and general advertising spam continue to score near the top among the types of spam sent. These three types alone account for approximately 60 percent of the spam sent during the past three quarters.

Firefox 3.5 beta 4 has excellent feature that lets your websites know where you are in order to bring you more relevant information which let you save your time while searching. This  implementation can be accessed via JavaScript, when it detects a geolocation request, an information bar is prompted so the user can accept or deny. For example, if you’re looking for “gift store” in your area, a simple search for “gift” will bring you the answers you need…no further information or extra typing required.

Some modern websites offer services which are quite convenient to use if they know your location (such as online mapping, or searching for specific things in your area). When you visit one of these sites, Firefox will ask you if you want it to provide the site with your current location.

If you wish to allow Geolocation, Firefox first check for relevant location markers for instance the location data provided by a GPS device built into or attached to your computer or browsing device, the signal strength of nearby wifi system and/or cell phone towers.