Clicks and Bits

Buried in the I Was a Cybercrook for the FBI article on Wired:

The full scope of the problem is hard to judge, but nonetheless staggering. U.S. banks lost $546 million to debit card fraud in 2004, according to banking research firm Dove Consulting, and credit card fraud losses were estimated to be about $3.8 billion globally in 2003 according to The Nilson Report. The Federal Trade Commission estimates that 10 million Americans are victims of credit card fraud each year. The financial impact of identity theft remains untold.

Wow. That is a pretty big number to absorb.

MessageLabs released their annual MessageLabs Intelligence Report which details their analysis of email threats (spam, phishing, virus) in 2006 and trends to watch in 2007.

The report indicates that the annual average spam rate for 2006 was 86.2% with 80% of all spam coming from Botnets (autonomous systems) and 63.4% of all spam cam from new sources indicating that spammers are staying a few steps ahead of the spam fighters.

Email-borne viruses had a relatively light year, but Phishing attacks doubled over 2005.

For 2007 they see a further decline in virus rates but a strong growth in Ransomware - malicious software which encrypts files and documents by using a secret key known only by the extortionist. Spam will become increasingly targeted to vertical markets, especially Finance and Legal. The threats to Mac OS X will begin to see an increase in worm attacks as the popularity of Apple continues to grow.

According to Google, they’ve now partnered with GoDaddy and eNom to provide privacy-enabled domain registrations for $10/year.

Now all of your custom Google-app goodness all in one place with Google Apps for Your Domain.

I was going get this blog going on all the fun things about the web; SEO/SEM, advertising, web analytics, domaining & monetization, etc. But as a contributing writer to a few different blogs, I’ve realized that the last thing I want to do is create yet another time commitment.

What will follow on this site going forward will likely be a random smattering of stuff that will server as my digital notebook, but likely won’t make much linear sense. Apologies if more was expected.

Welcome to Clicks and Bits. Covering:

• Web Analytics
• Search (SEO/SEM)
• Web Advertising
• Domain Names

Thanks for stopping by.