Who`s reading your mail?

According to a recent study, companies are reading employee e-mail more and more. The survey revealed up to 38% of companies that have more than 1 000 employees have hired staff to read and/or analyse out-going e-mail content.

The survey also showed that almost a third of companies have fired an employee for a violation of e-mail policy in the past year, and more than half had employees disciplined due to an e-mail violation in the same time.

As much as 38% of companies that have more than 1 000 employees have hired staff to read and/or analyse out-going e-mail content.

Ilva Pieterse, Journalist

Security experts have cracked Arhiveus-A, a variation of the ransomware Trojan, by discovering its password. As discussed last week, this malware, holds a user`s My Documents contents for ransom. However, this is only one version of the ransonware, so we are left wondering how long until another version become dominant.

Obviously, if the password, which is mf2lro8sw03ufvnsq034jfowr18f3cszc20vmw, has become public knowledge, the Trojan will not be used for long. And so the saga continues.

A spammer has finally seen the light - after being slapped with a million dollar fine. Ryan Pitylak from Texas, who was once listed as the world`s fourth worst spammer, has announced his involvement in the anti-spam community by offering his clients advice on protecting their systems against spam. I guess he has to try and make the money back somehow.

Many target companies, however, are sceptical about his sincerity due to his previous unethical behaviour.

Mozilla has come under the spotlight regarding multiple flaws in its Firefox 1.x and 0.x browser versions. The flaws made them vulnerable to cross-site scripting and HTTP response smuggling attacks, among others.

Mozilla, however, issued patches on Friday and is asking all users of Firefox to update their browsers to Firefox version 1.5.0.4.

Sweden`s government Web site crashed on Sunday, reportedly done by a revengeful hacker that was upset about the closure of a popular file-sharing site, The Pirate Bay.

The Web site was apparently difficult to access for nine hours, but was never completely out of service. Swedish police are in the process of investigating a suspected hacker but even after 200 servers were seized and three people incorrectly arrested, the crooks remain on the loose.

Microsoft (MS) is confident that Windows Vista will be much more of a challenge to exploit than former versions of its operating systems.

With its latest beta version, MS has incorporated technology, called Address Space Layout Randomisation, that shifts the start address of frequently used code libraries after every system restart.

This technology makes exploitation of most memory flaws more unreliable.

Sources used: Search Security, IOL.co.za, SecurityFocus