Ask Marian

When I get on the computer each day I have a number of standard websites I check before I get into email, projects or meetings. You likely have your own, perhaps one set for the work day and others for leisure time. My prime targets include news, technology, government and parenting sites. Most of them are managed by large corporations with IT departments and staff dedicated to securing the site and designing a positive user experience. Still, I find it jarring how often the edges of any webpage are littered with junk advertising. The ones that bug me most are the dancing girls of mortgage ads, the anti-aging skin care fright mask images, or anything strobing or flashing at me. Dan Neil of The Los Angeles Times calls them "punch the monkey" ads. Read more...

The issue of medical identity theft is not entirely new and can take several forms. A stolen name and insurance number can allow a crook to pose as you to receive medical benefits. Or an employee of a medical provider can steal private information and resell to criminal rings. Or a physician or other medical provider might fraudulently charge your insurance for services never received or drugs resold to others. You might never discover you are a victim or find you owe hundreds of thousands of dollars for care that went to others. How to protect yourself? What is available to assist victims? Read more...

Imagine this common scenario: you’ve been laid off and you need to register with the state to receive unemployment benefits. Part of the requirement today in California is to post your résumé to a state-run CalJobs website. An investigation into the security of that website has uncovered numerous security risks that could easily lead to identity theft for the hundreds of thousands of users. Read more...

Among my social networking friends, I know of at least two whose accounts have been hacked and many more who have experienced attempts. One of these exploits turned painful when his friend fell for the pleas of the criminals and wired money to help out his stranded “friend”. The other friend managed to notify many of her online friends to be wary of any social networking messages she might appear to send. Read more...

A two-year FBI investigation into phishing, or cybercrime efforts to gain access to bank accounts via fraudulent emails, has resulted in a sting operation against 100 people in the US and Egypt. The phishing scam stole approximately $1.5 million from at least 5,000 customers of at least two U.S. banks (Bank of America and Wells Fargo) according to news reports. Read more...

October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month. You can learn more about cyber security from the National Cyber Security Alliance, a public/private organization that brings together the minds and resources of companies like Symantec and Microsoft along with government agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security. Their website at http://www.staysafeonline.org/ has a deep and wide array of resources for individuals and organizations to up their safety education. One of my favorites is their lesson plans for teachers that help incorporate important online safety lessons into their curriculum. And these lesson plans are FREE! Here is a link. Read more...

It's easy to imagine how your child's school might use an extra $20,000. Maybe new math books that crack when you first open them or band uniforms with an extra gold braid down the leg; field trips where you order the "good buses" or even a few SMART boards for the classrooms. $20,000 might even mean the return of a beloved teacher! Read more...

This is a very common story. You are toodling along, reading your email, surfing the web, updating your Facebook status when you get an alert on your screen. It says, "Your computer is infected" or something similar. The alert looks very official, like it came from your operating system. There's a button to click, so you do. Suddenly, a cool looking scan appears on your screen, showing you progress as it searches your system and finds several viruses and other malware. You think, "How can this be happening? I have security software on my computer?? Did it fail me?" Read more...

Did you know if you or one of your children are now in college many technology manufacturers offer deep discounts on their products? Often, all that is needed to qualify is an email address ending in .edu, the standard extension used by colleges and universities. Small print on the offer pages may provide other ways of validating your identity if you lack the email address or you attend a technical college. Read more...

Every ¼ of a second, a new cybercrime is committed. One in five consumers is a cybercrime victim. Global cybercrime revenues exceed that of the international drug trade. What's going on here? While many of us were worrying about old-school viruses getting on our computers, the world of cybercrime took it to a whole new level. Not only ramping up the speed with which they toss new threats out into the marketplace (we've seen logarithmic growth in new malware over the last 2 years), cybercriminals are far more sophisticated in their efforts, buying and trading your private information in a vast, underground black market. Read more...

A new study on predictive elements of cyberbullying is published in the current edition of CyberPsychology & Behavior magazine. The study, from Dr. Gustavo S. Mesch of University of Haifa, Israel, measures risks of online victimization among a sampling of American teens and their parents. What increases your child's risk for being a victim of cyberbullying? Joining social networks, sharing personal information, participating in chat rooms and even watching YouTube videos will increase your child's risk factors. Lots of e-communication like sending text messages, Instant messages and emails also puts the child at higher risk. Read more...

Today is the 40th anniversary of the Internet. To mark this important milestone Symantec - the global leader in online security - took a look back at some of the most notorious threats ever seen online: Read more...

I tried to avoid the obvious puns of “online search can get you burned” or “only you can prevent cybercrime.” Out of respect to my old friends at the US Forest Service and Smokey Bear, I’ll demonstrate my editorial restraint. The most important news to report is that, as predictably as smoke will indicate fire, big tragedies attract malicious cybercriminals to take advantage of consumer curiosity and generosity. In the case of the current California wildfires, an innocent web search for news or an attempt to donate to the victims can lead you into some serious hotspots. Read more...

Our recent cell phone bill revealed a new cybercrime to me. First, my husband noticed a mysterious $9.99 "premium services" charge on the bill for my oldest child's line. He asked her if she'd signed up for any text services or paid for a ringtone. When she proclaimed her innocence, he left the bill for me to follow up with the cell provider, since the line is in my name. You'll never guess what I uncovered. SMS scams that begin with innocent social networking fun. Read more...

Filthy, dirty websites to avoid; Cyberbullying leads to jailtime for one UK girl and legal trouble for a Missouri woman; Freedom of speech versus internet slander; Hotelier data breach, and first US center for web addictions. These are some of the topics in our headlines across a variety of Internet safety topics. Let's break it down: Read more...

In an earlier blog post, I provided some tips for making YouTube a better, safer experience for children. Despite the fine efforts of the folks at YouTube, not only is there inappropriate content on the site but misleading comments, links and tags can take your child from videos you'd approve of to content you'd never allow. We know that YouTube is the top destination for our children online, proven in anecdotes from visits to schools and in our recent study of children monitored by our new OnlineFamily.Norton family safety service. Read more...

For many middle school and high school children, back to school time isn't just a time for new binders, pencils and clothes. It's a time for the summer break from bullying, both cyber and physical, to end. Your children may not tell you of their fears regarding bullying as you prep them for another school year. It's up to you to ask the right questions to uncover this problem and help guide them on the right path for a happier school experience. Read more...

Kids have so much time on their hands in the summer and much of that time will be spent online. For parents who use OnlineFamily.Norton, the new and easy-to-use family safety service from the makers of Norton Internet Security, there's no mystery about what your kids are searching for and where they are clicking. OnlineFamily.Norton has just released a study showing what kids are searching for (the Norton Top 100, if you will) from the millions of searches monitored by OnlineFamily.Norton during the survey period of February 2009 through July 2009. Read more...

The gap in awareness between parent and child in terms of where they go, what they do, who they talk to on the Internet is well-trodden research territory. Symantec's own Norton Online Living Report went there, with data on how much time kids spend online and what their parents think (kids are online twice as long as parents realize.) Today's study from Common Sense Media sheds even more light on social networking activities and the relative cluelessness of parents. Read more...

In the early morning hours today, the Twitter website was attacked by unknown web assailants with a flood of requests or "hits" on their domain. This made the site unavailable for legitimate users and caused an outage of several hours. This form of attack is known as a "Distributed Denial of Service" attack and is not new to Internet users or website administrators. Read more...

“Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do when they come for you.” (lyrics courtesy of Mr. Bob Marley) International DJs on social networking sites are being targeted by a scammer, or scammers, with a new take on an advance-fee fraud, a.k.a. a 419 scam. (A 419 scam typically pops up disguised as an e-mail from some member of a royal family from a country far away, trying to transfer large amounts of money to you.) Pretending to be an event organizer from Miami searching for new talent to stand-in for another artist who cancelled a booking on short notice, the scammer reaches out to unsuspecting DJs to offer them a dream come true. Read more...

Today's spam or hack of the day seems to be the Go0gle-Wizard hack. There's a lot of tweets coming in displaying big stories of quick money made with this unknown service. Most people believe it's a hack but I don't have enough information yet. I'll update this post as soon as I do but be careful and don't click those links! Read more...

The message might have come in early today on your Twitter feed, "Want to know whos stalking you on twitter!?: http://twitviewer.net/" You might have clicked the link to visit the website. It all happened so fast, the fabulous offer (heck yeah, I want to know who the last 200 people are to look at my Twitter profile!) and the large scale distribution of the "tweet". Even seasoned journalists who should always wear their cynical and world-weary thinking caps fell for it. Read more...

It may not have seemed immediately apparent when Twitter debuted on the social networking, micro-blogging, Silicon Valley scene, but it's ideal for allowing companies (big and small) to develop intimate relationships with their customers. Who would have guessed that having the ability to send itty bitty messages to your customers by web and text would have any meaningful application at all? We already had email and customers could sign up for newsletters and promotional offers by the score. And, with 800 toll free telephone numbers, a customer could call with a question or issue. Read more...

The Symbian operating system powers nearly ½ of worldwide cell phones (according to the IDC). According to the virus industry playbook, dominant operating systems attract the most malware. And true to the nature of those rules, researchers have found what appears to be the very first mobile botnet created to spread via Symbian operated smart phones. Read more...

Apparently someone has taken a video of ESPN reporter Erin Andrews using their covert "peeping tom" skills. That criminal act should be terrible enough, depriving a woman of her privacy and damaging her reputation for the titillation of strangers. Now that video of her has gone online and viral, it's spreading rapidly. Her victimization continues despite the efforts of legitimate website owners and ESPN lawyers to find and remove these postings. Naturally, the incredible popularity of any video content that is licentious, illegal and likely to become scarce is driving cybercriminals to use Andrews' video as a draw to infect your computer. This malware may come to you via Twitter postings, search results (type "Erin Andrews" into a Google toolbar and a reference to this trashy video is the second suggested entry) or a spam email. Click the link (hmmm, that sounds familiar) and you'll be prompted to download a video player to watch the tape. That download will contain a whole host of viral trouble and very little nudity if at all. Read more...

There's evidence that the Conficker botnet (oh, did you really think they distributed those millions of bots without a plan to monetize them?) is now being used on a "for hire" basis. A story from the UK referencing a new report from Cisco, states that malware called Waledec is being distributed via Conficker's millions of infected computers. Waledec uses your system to send out spam and spread itself to other computers. Before you pull your hair out in frustration, just make sure you've got an up-to-date copy of Norton Internet Security or another comprehensive security product on your computers. Check your kid's computers including any new netbooks you've received and scan your USB or thumb drives for signs of infection. Read more...

I participated in a ritual of youth last night. I attended the midnight screening of a highly anticipated new film, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince." I truly felt my age while sitting on the movie theater steps along with hundreds of other eager fans for several hours as the clock ticked us closer to midnight and the teens and young adults in costume swarmed around me. It gave me time to think about what I was witnessing. Most of the young people in line were college aged. Twelve years ago, when the first book was published (in the UK as "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" and retitled for the US as "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"), they must have been barely 7 years old. At about the same time, the Internet began to develop in earnest. This audience is one that has grown up online. And they've truly grown up with the "Potter" series in print, and then in film version. They didn't seem to view the "Potter" experience as a relic of childhood or something "retro" to view cynically. In fact, for the audience I was part of, it was clear that "Harry Potter" is a source of joy, identity and comfort. Read more...

Social networks can cause us all headaches but it's a special kind of pain for teachers, especially younger teachers or those who are the early adopters of technology. The raging debate is whether or not it's ok for a teacher to "friend" a current student among their friends on Facebook or another social network. In this week's New York Times Magazine's Ethicist column, Randy Cohen struggles with a version of this issue: whether or not the children's privacy is at risk when the teacher is a friend. What responsibility does the teacher have to correct actions they see online that are illegal, unethical or break school rules? It's an important point, though I still worry more about this from the parent's perspective and my desire to keep my children safe. They still lack judgment about what to post and who to allow within their most intimate circles. Remember, a friend in a social network likely has access to your information, comments, photos and other posts that a stranger does not. The latest changes to Facebook's privacy settings may help a teacher or student who wants to find the right balance and participate in this important online dialogue while at the same preserving their privacy and separating their worlds from inappropriate scrutiny. Read more...

I'm not surprised. Today, Federal Judge George Wu tentatively rejected the federal conviction of Lori Drew in the her infamous cyber bullying case. It's not surprising since the case hinged on a strange interpretation of the laws about terms of use policies for MySpace. Since the malicious messages were sent from a fake account, the creation of the fake account become the issue to be decided in the case. It is so normal for online users to simply click "Yes" or "Accept" and ignore, misread, or misunderstand those complex, legal documents called "User Agreements" or "Terms of Use Policies". There doesn't usually seem to be a penalty in doing so. To now claim that this behavior is actual evidence of hacking is a specious argument to most casual observers. Rather, it was a convenient prosecutor's effort to find a way to get justice for the Meier family for the tragic loss of their beloved Megan. Read more...