Comcast and the botnets

I use Comcast, and really have no complaints, although I have heard other people say the service is less than adequate. I found this article about Comcast tries pop-up alerts to warn of botnets. This new service for Comcast users is being tested here in Denver. In another article from SearchSecurity, there is interesting information about the new generation of botnets that are tinier, stealthier and can contain thousands (87K in one example) of variants of malware.

I'm glad to see Comcast responding actively to this issue.

How safe is your password?

This is an interesting article from a user that started out with a 6 character password years ago, and now is changing all passwords for all applications. I understand the idea of it being hard to memorize many different passwords. I had an instructor tell me that all users should use passwords that are at least 16 characters long, and they should type them in 10 or so times to remember them. It is the weakest link in the chain.

Next Gen Bank Trojan

Interesting article here about a new bank trojan that is spread through malicious javascript or Adobe pdf files. They put up a site, had 90,000 hits, infected 6,400 machines, stole money from a few of those users. Their technique is to steal the $ out of the account while the user is logged in and show the user a fake bank balance. They stole $438,000 in 22 days.