Blog.Ivacy.com

The New York Times has up an article discussing the trend of employers tracking the ‘free time’ activities of their employees via their web presence.

“When they do go off the clock and off the corporate network, how they spend their private time should be of no concern to their employer, even if the Internet, by its nature, makes some off-the-job activities more visible to more people than was previously possible. In the absence of strong protections for employees, poorly chosen words or even a single photograph posted online in one’s off-hours can have career-altering consequences.”

The piece likens this activity to the ‘Sociological Department’ that the Ford Company ran to monitor the home lives of their workers. Overstatement, or the corp as Big Brother?

markybob writes

“An open-source bittorrent client, Deluge, now provides an internal, anonymizing browser to protect its users from overzealous ISPs. The client runs on Windows, Linux and OS X. From the site: “Everyone knows that it is common practice for ISPs to do their best to either block or throttle bittorrent users. We believe that this is wrong and unethical, as there are many legal uses for bittorrent. If an ISP is throttling or blocking bittorrent traffic, you can pretty much bet that they’re tracking which users visit bittorrent-related sites so that they can better block or throttle those users.” Their forum has more info”

Security vendor F-Secure noted the announcement by Nikolay Patrushev, head of the Russian FSB (Federal Security Agency). Patrushev said federal sites fought off 1.4 million attacks this year. Also, Patrushev noted the pending trial of the authors of the Trojan creator, Pinch. Only the names of Russian citizens Ermishkin and Farhutdinov have been publicized as those behind Pinch.

“The financial losses due to Pinch infections can hardly be calculated,” F-Secure said. It has been estimated that malware created with Pinch in turn has infected millions of PCs. News of another scam connected to criminals in Russia, and in the Ukraine, involved fourteen people in The Netherlands who acted as mules for money laundering. The Channel Register said fake ABN Amro websites in Hong Kong stole credentials from bank customers.

Those credentials enabled the thefts to take place. The report cited prosecutors as noting the accused collaborators who muled the money “were generously renumerated” by the criminals.

Via SecurityProNews.