Stories about: American Greetings

When a late arrival thought he'd catch up on the buzz at a recent conference of CIOs, he logged into Twitter. What he found -- or rather didn't find -- amazed him.

Spoofers, spammers and phishers, beware. There's a new gun in town, and some of the Internet's most powerful companies -- including Yahoo, Google, PayPal and AOL -- are brandishing it in the ongoing battle against e-mail fraud.

How bad was 2007 for breaches, vulnerabilities and similar mayhem? On the bright side, it was better than 2008 is forecast to be. With more of every sort of meltdown predicted -- more criminalization of the hacker community, more Web-application attacks, more phishing, more spamming, more zero-day attacks and more virtualization-related threats -- we're happy to tell you that you are likely to look back on 2007 as the peaceful old days.

In yet another example showing that clueless consumers aren't the only ones who fall victim to computer scams, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory yesterday disclosed that phishing attacks may have provided cybercrooks with access to personal data on people who visited the lab between 1990 and 2004.

Apparently it's not just unwary individuals that fall victim to online scammers. Even large corporations, it seems, can get suckered into parting with their money by devious phishers.

For better or worse, many of your current or potential customers obtain their buying information from the Web -- and not just from your company Web site, where you can control what they see. While they will visit your site, they will also use search engines, and they will try to get the full picture from established news sources such as PC World, from blogs, and from shopper comments on Amazon, PriceGrabber, and similar sites. If you have a skeleton in your Web closet, they'll likely find it. So how can you protect your company or product reputation? Here are ten ways to combat bad Web PR.

Beware of Web postcards bearing greetings. That's the advice from The SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center (ISC), which is warning about e-mail messages that pose as Web postcards, then direct recipients to a Web site that installs a Trojan horse program.

There's an undercurrent of frustration at this year's Demomobile trade show, an event designed to highlight innovation in mobile and wireless computing.

As the Internet matures, businesses continue to try and entice new users to visit their Web sites while also devising ways to generate revenues to pay for the sites.

Remember when you could barely resist the Internet's lure? When the rush of discovering a new Web site or stumbling across a nifty service kept you coming back for more; when the content was so rich and plentiful that you could read, read, read all day long? Well, that was last year.