Earlier this evening, my wife recieved an unusual text message to her phone:

"From: No Caller ID
"Date: 1/6/09 5:55 pm
"This is an automated message from Arlington Virginia FCU. Your ATM card has been suspended. To reactivate call urgent at (800) 295-3174."

I don't think I have to state that neither Lyssa nor myself have accounts with the Arlington, VA Federal Credit Union.

So I've been doing some detective work on who sent this and I've found out a few things. Unfortunately, because the initial contact came via a text message I don't have any way …

This is week four of my "three weeks out, one week in" work cycle, so I'll have much more constant net.access for at least a couple of days. I may as well take the time to write a couple of updates. My off-the-road workload has been sizable lately, enough so that even working from home means a day of solid work, with little to no socially acceptable goofing off at work stuff going on, such as reading Slashdot or checking one's e-mail. Work aside, I haven't been doing much of anything at all. Yesterday morning, Lyssa and I drove …

Scarcely one year after the initial appearance of the Storm Worm and its resulting botnet, some heretofore untapped functionality's been pushed out in one update or another in just the past couple of days: Not only is the botnet sending out phishing-related spam but the phishing sites are hosted on the infected machines themselves. The information security community is speculating that it may now be possible for the controller of the botnet to partition it and assign different tasks to different segments of the infected net.population. As if that weren't problem enough, the domains that the phishing sites use …