Stories by: Joan Goodchild

A scam that has been making its way around Twitter for some time has resurfaced recently and promises to increase a user's followers, but really gives control of one's account to a questionable third party.

As more people create Facebook profiles (500 million and growing), and sign on to the many social media sites available today, hiring managers are finding they have new opportunities to get background information on job candidates.

Boston-based Bay Cove Human Services is a non-profit organization that offers assistance and service to 4,000 people and families in Massachusetts. CIO Hilary Croach has several technology challenges to contend with. For starters, the agency has its hands in a number of service areas, including helping individuals with developmental disabilities, mental illness, drug and alcohol addiction, and those who need support with aging. With about 140 locations around Eastern Massachusetts, Bay Cove's employees and IT operations are scattered.

Malware creators are already using the news of Osama Bin Laden's death as a opportunity to try and dupe people into clicking on malicious links. According to cloud-security firm Zscaler, researchers were already seeing malicious sites emerge to capitalize on the news within hours of the announcement.

Notorious spam botnet Rustock has gone quiet and security analysts aren't sure why.

My colleague, Bill Brenner, has a t-shirt he likes to wear that basically says social networking feeds the darker sides of human nature. The shirt is a parody of a Venn Diagram and shows the relationship between sites like Facebook and Twitter to what some might called undesirable character traits, such as ADHD, stalking and narcissism.

Many of us watch the events in the Middle East and North Africa unfold from afar. But for businesses with operations in these global regions of political unrest, protests, rebel uprising and deteriorating security often force difficult and immediate decisions for the sake of keeping

Published figures estimating the size and scope of botnets are often inaccurate and do not reflect the threat these compromised networks pose to security, according to research released this week by ENISA, the European Network and Information Security Agency.

In its recent annual security report, Cisco predicted VOIP abuse as a potential area for cyber crime growth.

Last year, malware became increasingly more common on popular and trusted domains, according to research released this week by security firm Blue Coat Systems. Migration to popular hacked sites with trusted reputations and acceptable-use category ratings was the primary theme for hosting malware delivery infrastructure, researchers claim.