Google Desktop Security Flaw with Internet Explorer
I've always had a bad feeling about google desktop, the application that enables things like searching your computer with google. It just seemed to me very difficult to make an app like that completely secure, and the functionality it provides doesn't seem worth the risk. At least, not yet.
This week, a security expert showcased a CSS-related security hole that allows a would-be intruder to use Internet Explorer to access the information on your computer and execute remote commands via Google Desktop.
In all fairness, despite my concern I can't really blame the desktop app. According to the article, the flaw isn't in Google's product per se; it's in Internet Explorer. In addition to Google Desktop, the exploit could be used to access any number of other applications that use a similar setup.
Lifehacker.com posted a quiz created by MailFrontier designed to challenge your ability to pick out phisher e-mails from legitimate ones.
They must be getting a boatload of traffic from the link. The direct link to the quiz is currently not working (as of Thursday morning, around 11 am est).
But the comment thread on Lifehacker is interesting in and of itself. Several commenters raise the great point that two of the best ways to spot a phisher are not possible in the quiz:
Look at the raw source of the message to see if the code behind the links are really pointing to the server they claim to in the text of the message.
Look at the full mail header to see where the message was sent from.
