The Mac Security Blog

Last week, Epsilon, a major e-mail marketing firm, suffered a serious data breach, whereby hackers obtained e-mail addresses and user names for potentially millions of users who had signed up to receive e-mail updates from dozens of companies. The companies infected include banks (Capitol One, Barclay’s, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase), stores (Walgreen, Kroger, Best Buy), and other web sites (TiVo, AbeBooks, Disney).

According to information made public about this breach, only e-mail addresses and user names were harvested. However, it is possible that for some of the affected sites, you may have entered a password, and if your password techniques are not very secure, you may have used a password that you use on many sites.

If the password in question is only for logging into web sites, and not for sites where you give credit card information, you have little to worry about. But for sites affected where you have provided credit card information, it is a good idea to change your password as soon as possible. Many web sites are notifying users of the breach, but not all will do so; because of this, it’s up to you to decide whether you should change passwords on multiple web sites or not.

For now, the extent of the breach is unclear. If, indeed, only e-mail addresses and user names were obtained, the worst one can fear is a large increase in spam and phishing e-mails. Intego software can help you fight against these threats. Intego VirusBarrier X6 includes a powerful anti-phishing tool, and Personal Antispam, Intego Internet Security Barrier, is an intelligent spam filter that learns from the e-mail you receive.

Every once in a while there’s some good news to share in the security arena, and we’re very happy to be able to end the news with a bit of positive information. It seems that spam levels are dropping, with October of this year being 18% lower than September. This was apparently due to the closing of a big spammer called Spamit in late September. Going further, Q4 2010 has seen even better numbers, with early December being about 30% less than September. Average levels of spam are around 83% for the quarter, compared with 88% for Q3 2010.

Of course, this means that 83% of all e-mail is spam, so it’s not yet time to get rid of your spam filters. (Such as Intego Personal Antispam, part of the company’s Internet Security Barrier suite.) But these trends mean that your spam filter will have just a bit less work to do.

Intego today announced the availability of a new version of Personal Antispam, the company’s intelligent spam filtering program. This release adds compatibility for Microsoft Outlook 2011, the e-mail program included with some versions of Office 2011. Personal Antispam 10.6.5 now provides spam-filtering support for Apple Mail, Microsoft Entourage (v. X, 2004 and 2008) and Microsoft Outlook 2011.

Personal Antispam is sold as part of Internet Security Barrier X6, a powerful security suite which also includes the following programs:

• VirusBarrier X6, which provides protection against malware and network threats
• ContentBarrier, the best parental control and content filtering solution for Mac
• Personal Backup, a powerful tool for backups, synchronizations and clones of startup volumes
• FileGuard, which stores confidential documents in virtual safes

System Requirements

Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6 (Leopard or Snow Leopard). Runs on Macs with Intel or PowerPC processors. Requires Apple Mail, Microsoft Entourage (v. X, 2004 and 2008) or Microsoft Outlook 2011.

Pricing and Availability

Personal Antispam 10.6.5 is a free upgrade for all registered users of Personal Antispam 10.6 or later. The upgrade is available via Intego NetUpdate.

Internet Security Barrier X6 is available now. Standard licenses protect up to 2 Macs. Also available: 5-Mac family packs and multi-seat licenses.

Also available is Internet Security Barrier X6 Dual Protection, which includes best-of-class Windows software so Mac users running Windows can protect their Mac and their Windows installation.

You certainly get a lot of spam, as we all do, but did you ever think that as much as 95% of all e-mail sent is spam? That’s what Panda Security is reporting. In addition, half of all spam comes from only ten countries, with India, Brazil and Russia heading the list.

You probably don’t realize that there’s this much spam out there, because much of it never gets to your computer. If you use e-mail at work, your company certainly has a spam filter that kills the most egregious types of spam, and at home, you may have an ISP with a spam filter as well. But a lot of it comes into your e-mail program. For what does come into your computer, Intego Personal Antispam, part of the company’s Internet Security Barrier suite, is the best way to filter out unwanted e-mails on your Mac. Learning from your e-mail – both spam and legitimate messages – Personal Antispam keeps your inbox spam-free.

In the past couple of days, we’ve been seeing a lot of spam purporting to come from the Apple Store. As you can see below, this spam is pretty primitive; it doesn’t look anything like Apple’s standard layout, and gives little information. In addition, it’s not even seriously dangerous: unlike phishing attempts, the link on this message doesn’t lead you to a page where you enter your name and password. It simply takes you to a “Canadian Pharmacy” website, where you can order “medications”, such as Viagra (which is most certainly bogus).

This spam is certainly taking advantage of the buzz around the iPad, as well as Apple’s general good health. So be aware: if you receive an unexpected e-mail, hover your cursor over the links it contains to see if they go to the site in question. As you can see above, this is not the case.

So we worried a lot about the Y2K bug, but its consequences were limited by awareness and updates. Now that 2010 is here, however, a number of “2010 bugs” have been spotted. Ranging from software problems to credit card glitches, the new year has caused a number of annoyances.

One such problem is on Mac OS X Server, which uses Spam Assassin as its server-side spam filter. It seems that Spam Assassin has problems with the new year, and is classifying some (in many cases most) incoming messages sent following January 1, 2010 as spam. Apple has issued a support document describing this problem, and offering solutions to fix it.