The following extraordinary sentence launched yet another tedious social enginering 419 scam in my spam box: "Take notice that based on the UNITED NATIONS government inauguration of this committee which extended to all countries which combined with the United Nation Anti-crime commission to alleviate and redeem the image and past wounds of our dear citizens and foreign firms who were duped, defrauded, scammed and abandoned by some impostors who indiscriminately use the name of God, Office of governors, Presidency, Banks etc to slight down our dignities to international communities." Most 419ers are clearly one sandwich short of a picnic as all they seem to do is replay the same old scams over and over. The 'clever' ones add daft little elaborations and the rest duly plagiarise them without actually understanding how dumb they end up sounding. This cretin continued: "Many banks have been in bankruptcy today, Universal firms, Companies due to the activity of these...

Using banned-word lists to block spam may be a simple and hence cheap control but it may be too crude or simplistic to work properly. Blocking emails with "teen" in them, for example, is perhaps not the smartest move made by New Zealand's Social Development Ministry .

A set of policies , presented as checklists or guidelines for employees, explains typical rules for employees who use blogs or other social media: "The Disclosure Best Practices Toolkit is a draft series of checklists to help companies, their employees, and their agencies learn the appropriate and transparent ways to interact with blogs, bloggers, and the people who interact with them. We believe in the principles of transparency and openness, and this document is a way of making this real on the inside. Our goal is not to create or propose new industry standards or rules. These checklists are open source training tools designed to help educate the hundreds or thousands of employees in any large corporation the appropriate ways to interact with the social media community." The authors evidently have a bee in their bonnet about people disclosing any pecuniary interest in the matters on which they are writing. If adapted to become corporate policies, management may wish to be...

The CBC Blogging Manifesto is not unlike a skeleton corporate policy about blogging by employees. Even in this succinct original form, it would be an interesting advisory or discussion piece for your intranet Security Zone.

Social networking has become extremely popular of late and is getting lots of coverage on new and traditional news media. Given the fact that a great deal of network/Internet use and applications have traditionally been social in nature, this is hardly surprising: what is more surprising is that the media and technology pundits seem to feel that we need to have a special term for it. Like most Internet and IT developments, it’s more evolution than revolution, and in fact more hype than substance in many cases. Businesses are making use of interactive social media for corporate (primarily marketing) purposes. While these applications are, at the moment, more projected than proven, it is undeniable that many enterprises are either openly examining social networking and so-called Web 2.0 technologies, or are facing covert use of these systems and technologies by rogue employees. Either way, employees need to find out about the concerns and security dangers related to such use before lan...

Some Nigerian thinks I was born yesterday: Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Message-Id: Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:12:44 +0200 (CEST) From :The Honourable Officeof the Finance Minister.(FMF)In collabration with (CBN)Office.ATT : Honourable Contr(FMF/CBN) Payment Notification Update. In order to eradicate the fraudulent rampant extortion of money from contractors as transfer charges and taxes by non-exiting individuals and corrupt Government officials.I am obliged to reach you concerning the immediate payment of your fund by ATM Visa Card. Be- informed that this communication superside any other you must have had with any office in connection with your payment. Investgations reveal that you have paid some good money in the past as transfer charges and taxes which did not reflect in the bank treasury, that means officials concern have help themselves to the money at your own detriment. Now that your file has scaled their huddle and your file is on my table.I want ...

NISTIR 7564 " Directions in Security Metrics Research " says: "Advancing the state of scientifically sound, security measures and metrics (i.e., a metrology for information system security) would greatly aid the design, implementation, and operation of secure information systems." Hear hear! "... Enterprise-Level Security Metrics, was included in the most recent Hard Problem List prepared by the INFOSEC Research Council ..." That I didn't know, but I totally agree: security metrics is indeed a Hard Problem. If you would like to metricate your ISMS, do take a look at NIST's new paper. The main body is quite short at just 15 pages but covers a wide brief, drawing on metrication practices from other fields. If you are eager to learn more, there are six pages of references to deepen your knowlege still further.