scandoo

Searching for Love online? We found there's a 1 in 7 chance you'll come across something nasty.

In the age where romance is allegedly dead, our research into this area just adds more fuel to that fire.

In the week before Valentines Day, we saw 1 in 48 of all internet searches were for Valentine’s related searches (terms such as valentines chocolates, flowers, cards, dinner, hotels). Of these Valentine’s Day related searches 1 in 7 search results yielded viruses or spyware.

Like most men Valentines day is more of a headache than anything else, so I decided to send my sweetheart an electronic card, and I wasn't alone, we saw requests for Electronic Card (eCards) sites increase by 300 percent on the day before!  But instead of being the saving grace for people like myself who 'forget' (read: are too lazy) to buy valentines cards, they represent a risk.  18 percent of the eCard sites our corporate customers requested contained some viruses or spyware.

At least I can now blame the malware mongers for killing romance (not just the modern man!)

ScanSafe announces its Annual Global Threat

ScanSafe today released its Annual Global Threat Report.

It's the analysis of over 60 billion web requests from all over the world.  It talks about the trends that we as a company have been seeing, and makes some interesting projections in that vein.

Of key interest for Scandoo users is our first ever publicly published analysis of Search Threats.

You can download a copy here.

Ready, Willing and Able (to take advantage...)

The BBC report about how recent storms in the UK are being picked on by virus writers to target individuals. 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6278079.stm

I mean it makes sense - take advantage of what people are going to be interested in clicking on, and they'll click and get malware... It may have become 'old-hat' when the tactic was used with naked photographs of tennis players, yet it still works today.

Does this really surprise anyone?  It's the oldest trick in the book - but sure it still works...

Malware authors now feel they can also get money from their work by adding Spyware into the payload as well as cause damage with their rogue code - so they now have even more motivation to adopt whatever tactics work successfully to get their wares out.

What does this show: if they are playing the oldest trick in the book, perhaps this even older piece of advice is even more relevant - there is no such thing as a free lunch.  Why would someone send you an e-mail with the subject "230 dead as storm batters Europe" from someone you likely don't know or an organisation you've never subscribed to?

To stay safe on the internet, good Malware scanning is essential - but a good old-fashioned cautionary approach to anything unfamiliar will definitely help.

Mirror mirror on the wall, what's 2007 got in store?

It's the start of the year, and so everyone is making their predictions for the next 12 months.

There are three sets, that I think make for interesting reading in the field of web safety. 

Firstly, there's our own Top 8 Predictions for 2007 which focuses more on the business side of things. For consumers of interest is that we think that ISP's will start to take web security more seriously at the gateway level (so your internet connection, not the software on your computer) so expect to see changes in that direction.

Over at ZDNet Richard Stiennon has possibly the most depressing set of predictions I've seen this year, but I think he's on to something in a couple of areas:

1. 100% growth in revenue for cyber crime. There are lots of estimates for just how big the cyber crime economy is. I peg it at over $1 bllion (sic) and under $10 billion. Whatever it is today I predict that the quest for financial gain will spur cyber criminals to a banner year, at least doubling their overall take.

This is something we've seen over the last year as well.  The number of financially targeted malware that our corporate customers were threatened by has just increased continuously, and is often peaking around public holidays catching people when they are at their most relaxed.

8. YouTube abuse threatens site.  Like network news, email, and IM before it, the new popular service, video sharing, will succumb to spammers who post ads, ad backed videos, and stealth marketing exploits, ruining the experience for everybody.

Being everyone's favourite can have its problems and our data seems to point in this direction, we've seen a rise in malware on Web 2.0 sites in general, with Social Networking Sites showing their vulnerability.

Finally Jennifer Granick the executive director of the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, predicts the scope for change on Licences and Privacy in particular how information gathered by software and websites is or can be used.   Her remarks on how the current legal frameworks protect us illustrates that there is a difference between what we might expect the case to be when we just click 'I accept'.

Happy New Year

At Team Scandoo, we'd like to wish all of our users seasons greetings and best wishes for the New Year.  Thank you all for making Scandoo such a great success this year.

We're looking forward to building on this in 2007 - a year jam packed of new Scandoo features!

Person of the Year: You

Time Magazine recently announced their person of the year - You.

It's always great to get recognition for your efforts, and for once I think Time Magazine got it right.  In what they herald as the "digital democracy", they highlight some of the great Web 2.0 resources, platforms and communities we have such as MySpace, YouTube and Wikipedia, all of which would be abject failures if they weren't open and had the wealth of user input.

However, these two traits are being taken advantage of by rogue elements, abusing them for hosting security threats, scams and inappropriate content. In August 2006, ScanSafe found 1 in 600 social networking pages hosted malware of some sort.

The reason we setup Scandoo was as a way for people to help protect themselves from the ever increasing dangers on the web including Web 2.0. Scandoo works by combining your input on sites and ScanSafe's security technologies. You can report offensive content/malware simply by hitting redefine in the bubble on any search result.
 
Together we can make the new Web 2.0 that YOU have created the safer place most of us want it to be.

Will you join us in our quest? 
Why not recategorise a site today?