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According to a report on Information Week, infamous “Spam King” Sanford Wallace, and his phishing partner Walter Rines were slammed with a whopping $225 million judgment by a U.S. District Court on Monday.

“MySpace has zero tolerance for those who attempt to act illegally on our site,” said Hemanshu Nigam, chief security officer of MySpace, in an e-mailed statement. “The Federal District Court in Los Angeles awarded MySpace $223,777,500 under the federal CAN-SPAM Act and $1,500,000 under the California anti-phishing statute. User engagement is up 32 percent year over year while spam is significantly decreasing, proving efforts like this are working.”

In October of 2006 the pair began creating bogus MySpace accounts and hijacking over 300,000 others. They then used the compromised accounts to send tens of thousands of spam messages and bomb the comment section of thousands of MySpace pages with links to other spam sites. The popular social networking site sued in 2007. Wallace posted a response to the judgement on his website, claiming he had never been served and that “the check is in the mail.”

Since 1997 Wallace has been sued by many service providers including AOL, Earthlink, and CompuServe, and last year was fined $4 million by the FTC for deceptive advertising and distributing spyware.

Read [InformationWeek]

If there’s anything I’ve learned about Apple, in all these years of reading, and just recently, writing about them, it’s that you don’t mess with them. Ever. That’s a lesson a lot of would-be Apple product burglars would do good in learning, lest they want to be the ones pictured and talked about in this article here. The two men you see here are the burglars that we reported about previously, responsible for stealing flat-screen TVs, computer games, iPods, DVDs, a box of liquor and even a set of car rims from an apartment shared by three roommates. The one on top is Edmon Shahikian, while the one on the bottom is Ian Frias. They were apprehended shortly after the owner of one of their stolen wares, a Mac laptop, used the Back To My Mac feature to photograph them and show their photos to the police. I wonder when anyone will be able to do that with their Windows lappies.

Read [NY Times]

An Apple Store employee whose apartment she was sharing with two roommates was recently victimized by burglars, however they had a happy ending thanks to the help of her stolen Mac’s screen sharing feature and built-in webcam.

After the house was burglarized by thieves, the Apple Store employee received a call from a friend asking if she was online, since it appears that she is online on her friend’s computer. The victim immediately logged on to the Internet and used the Back-to-My-Mac program and found out that her Mac was indeed connected to the Internet. Not wasting any time, the victim quickly activated her Mac’s built-in webcam and the screen sharing feature in order to take a snapshot of the thief who was currently using her notebook. The victim’s friend recognized the man in the picture as someone who had been at her apartment during the recent get together. 

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While rumors about buyouts, mergers and partnerships continue to swirl around them, the number one and number two social network websites are announcing new features and services. MySpace, the top social site, is taking the wraps off of “data availability,” which allows members to easily share public profile information and user-generated content with Yahoo!, Ebay, Flickr and Photobucket.
And Facebook, after hearing complaints from state attorneys general about the threat from child predators and cyberbullies on its website, has agreed to tighten up security to protect its under-18 users. The social network will work with a task force to make sure identities and ages of members can be verified while trying harder to keep inappropriate content - including alcohol and tobacco advertising - from underage eyes. 

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A woman is suing Best Buy for $50,000 after a Geek Squad employee admitted viewing, and later stealing the nude photos she had on her PC. He copied them to his flash drive, shared them with his fellow employees and put them on the hard drives of other customers. While employee, William E. Giffels fully admitted to viewing and copying the photos to his flash drive, he claimed they ended up on other computers computers solely by accident when he forgot to delete them from the drive before allowing other employees to use it to access the diagnostic tools he also had stored on it. 

There hasn’t been any comment from Best Buy yet, but one can assume Mr. Giffels will be seeking new employment soon. While he is clearly in the wrong for what he did, you have to wonder why anyone would hand over a computer for repair without removing such sensitive and private content? When you think about it it could have been much worse. What if he had copied her banking or credit card info instead? I think the lesson here is if you have to take your PC in for repair, make sure there’s nothing on it you wouldn’t want the whole world to see!

Read [The Consumerist]

A mobile phone company ad slogan, “it’s all about the network” is being taken to heart by identity thieves.

We’re not just talking about the cellular networks that allow you to send text messages, surf the web and shop from your handy mobile device; if a Los Angeles Times story is any indication, social networks are becoming prime real estate for sleazy personal information harvesters, spammers and just plain mischief-makers.

Some examples: MySpace users who didn’t know they were facilitating the spamming of friends; fake log-in pages for social sites capturing user IDs and passwords; widgets for dressing up profile pages hiding malware for stealing financial information.

Then there are the incidents that fall into the creepy category, according to the non-profit Identity Theft Resource Center, based in San Diego.

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Our personal choice for low-cost, well actually free Windows anti-virus has been AVG for a long time now, which as you can imagine is directly related to the price. There are lots of great alternatives and I cannot or will not attempt to tell you which is the best, however if you are looking for another alternative to AVG, that you can also get for free, check out Microsoft OneCare 2.0, which currently is free after rebates. Amazon is offering OneCare 2.0 for $30 along with a $30 mail-in-rebate, which will in turn lower the cost to $0. Similar to other subscription based services, this $30 will offer one-years worth of protection, after which it will have to be renewed.

Product [Amazon] Via [jkOnTheRun]

If you like the color orange and like to see IT geeks beating up on zombies, secret agents, ninjas and aliens, head on over the Forefront site.  There you’ll find a free public beta download of the integrated security software that was released quietly last month.

Code-named “Stirling”, this public beta secures clients, server and networks.  “Our goal with Stirling is an integrated client, server and network edge, all managed through a simple intuitive console,” said Ryan Hamlin, GM of Microsoft’s Access and Security Division.

Microsoft touts the beta as comprehensive, integrated and simplified.  The site works hard to demonstrate “normal” IT employees defending their systems.  Kinda cute and clever; with funky music to boot.

Microsoft expect the full bells and whisltes version to be released in the first half of next year.

Product Page [Microsoft]

AVG announced that their Anti-Virus Free Edition 8.0 is now available for download. This free edition combines an anti-virus and anti-spyware engine to protect users machines against spyware attacks aside from the usual viruses that threaten your computer on a daily basis. The software also provides real-time searching protection with AVG’s LinkScanner technology which was incorporated into the new AVG Security Toolbar.

An English version of the Anti-virus software will be released first, to be followed by other language versions over the next few months. The software can be freely downloaded and used only on single computers which are running on Windows 2000, XP or Vista. 

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Although we have previously mentioned Toshiba’s face recognition technology in our coverage of the Satellite A300 and M300 and P300, it is only now that Toshiba is officially promoting the said feature. Toshiba has employed this technology to provide Satellite owners an additional way of securing their dear Toshiba machines from unauthorized users. The technology grants or denies access to people who might use the laptops depending on whether they are registered users.

To use the face recognition technology to secure their laptops, users need to have their face profiled by the laptop’s webcam during a short setup process. Once profiled, the laptop’s webcam would use this to reference people who are about to use the laptops as recognized by the laptop’s webcam. If a user’s face has not been profiled before, then the laptop would deny them access to the machine.

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