Carl Jongsma

Who is the real identity behind that Gmail account? While finding out may not be as easy as knowing who is behind chunkylover53@aol.com (Homer Simpson, for the curious), it apparently isn't much harder.

Yahoo might have recently attracted attention for the public compromise of one of US Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin's accounts, but there are people looking at all providers for weaknesses in account creation (spammers), account recovery (hackers), or other account management functions, such as the identity behind the address.

If you needed any more reminders about why it isn't a good idea to use external mail services to conduct critical business, the recent break-in to US Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's gov.palin@yahoo.com Yahoo inbox should be it. Of note is that following the disclosure of the inboxes the compromised address and another address, gov.sarah@yahoo.com, have been suspended.

US politics has been stung by a range of inappropriate email usage incidents, including the use of non-government email accounts to conduct official business. From the images presented as proof of email compromise, it seems that Sarah Palin was also doing this.

Mac antivirus maker Intego has published an alert about a potential OS X virus that an enterprising individual is trying to sell through auction. With absolutely no technical information to go on, the antivirus maker is treating the announcement with caution.

Based on the rate and type of vulnerabilities identified by projects like the Month of Apple Bugs it isn't too far fetched to expect that there are dozens or even hundreds of OS X specific viruses/malware creations that are sitting on the systems of their developers but which do not have many opportunities for widespread distribution.