I hope I never find mine on Google.

Now and again, I google for my social security number, hoping that the number of hits will be zero but fearing that it won't be. So far, so good.

posted by mt at 12:41

The NYTimes has a piece on small networks and home machines being used by spammers as relays.

As spam has proliferated — and with it the attempts by big Internet providers to block messages sent from the addresses of known spammers — many mass e-mailers have become more clever in avoiding the blockades by aggressively bouncing messages off the computers of unaware third parties.

In the last two years, more than 200,000 computers worldwide have been hijacked without the owners' knowledge and are currently being used to forward spam, according to AOL and other Internet service providers. And each day thousands of additional PC's are compromised at companies, institutions and — most commonly of all — homes with high-speed Internet connections shared by two or more computers.

posted by mt at 12:16

Slashdot has a story linking to a series in the Washington Post this week about a group of Russian crackers. The important points? They were distributed, well organized, in it for the money - and successful.
posted by mt at 13:33