By Shannon McCarty-Caplan

Chicago is alive with preparations for its big St. Patrick’s Day Celebrations this weekend. Tomorrow morning, the day before St. Patrick’s Day, the Chicago River downtown is dyed green (now with non-toxic dye), followed by the parade, with revelry planned on both days throughout the city – everywhere from pubs and restaurants to cultural centers and churches.

I plan on partaking in the revelry with my fellow Chicagoans, but I definitely won’t be alone.  According to a poll conducted this week by by Cint USA and Trend Micro, almost 60% of respondents plan on participating in St. Patrick’s Day festivities this weekend, with about a quarter headed to a parade or pub.  Five percent even admitted to planning on calling in sick on Monday to recuperate from all the “fun.”

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By Vic Hargrave

Phishing is an ever-present danger on the Internet threat landscape. In my blog Dealing With Phishy Emails I wrote about what you can do to combat conventional phishing attempts. By “conventional” I mean those emails that use social engineering techniques to get you to click on links in the messages that would lead you to malicious websites where you are prompted to enter valuable personal data – credit card numbers, login credentials, etc.

As I pointed out before, these attacks are fairly easy to detect. Most browsers and email clients provide some measure of protection from them. And, of course, security solutions like Trend Micro Titanium do a pretty good job of combating phishing by keeping you away from known malicious websites.

But over the past year Trend Micro threat researchers have observed that spear-phishing is on the rise. According to Trend Micro security paper Spear-Phishing Email: Most Favored APT Attack Bait, “91% of the targeted attacks it collected data on between February and September 2012 involved spear-phishing tactics that dupe a victim to open a malicious file or Website.”

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There’s one club right now that some major public figures and celebrities are in that they wish they weren’t a member of and you don’t want to join either: the doxxing club. Famous victims have had their detailed personal information stolen via “doxxing” and posted out on the Internet for all to see.

Doxxing is a new form of identity theft where attackers try to impersonate you by gathering as much information as they can from a variety of sources, and then use that information to get access to more sensitive personal information. For example, reports tell us that attackers are doing this by targeting the free credit reporting site Annualcreditreport.com.

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By Greg Boyle

680 million people access Facebook on their mobile devices. For a lot of these people, it’s the only way they interact with the social network. They check-in, post pictures, like, friend, and unfriend, all while on the go or on the sofa. But many of them – about 28% according to Consumer Reports – never change their privacy settings.

Because a Facebook’s default account settings include seven that we deem to be a privacy risk, we developed the Trend Micro™ Privacy Scanner app to help  make mobile Facebooking safer and more private.

Privacy Scanner scans your Facebook profile settings and warns you of any potential privacy concerns. Then it will also help you make the recommended changes from within the app.

This free app takes an average time of under three minutes to scan and fix the privacy concerns.  In the future, if and when Facebook makes changes to its settings, we’ll update our app to make sure you stay protected. So even after your first scan its worth leaving the Privacy Scanner installed for the next update from Facebook.

Currently, Privacy Scanner is available only for Android devices. You can get the no-cost app now from Google Play.

I work for Trend Micro and the opinions expressed here are my own.

For more tips and advice regarding Internet, mobile security and more, just “Like” Trend Micro Fearless Web Internet Security on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/fearlessweb.

By Richard Medugno

It looks like Facebook’s going to do another tweak to what we see in our news feed. These aren’t the best of times for “the social network” if you believe the New York Times article Face-Lift at Facebook, to Keep Its Users Engaged. Facebook seems to be very concerned about a recent survey that discovered 61% of their users have taken a “sabbatical,” many citing “boredom” as a reason.

Now, on top of this finding we heard a few months back that German researchers found that after spending time on Facebook many people felt lousy with envy of their “friends.”

“The researchers found that one in three people felt worse after visiting the site and more dissatisfied with their lives, while people who browsed without contributing were affected the most,” wrote Belinda Goldsmith in her Reuters  article. Apparently, this finding surprised the German academics. They didn’t expect that 33% of users would have a negative experience from Facebook, “leaving them feeling lonely, frustrated or angry.”

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By Greg Boyle

I’m a private person. I worry about the information I post online. I have a personal Facebook profile and a work Facebook profile to try to control the information seen by people in both sides of my life. I don’t post pictures of my kids, and rarely post pictures of myself and my wife.

Some would say that’s boring, and may be they are correct, but it is a matter of personal preference. Once an image(or information) is on the Internet it is out there forever. A personal photo of your children shared into the open can be copied and misused very easily.

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By Christopher Budd

If you’ve been reading the news lately, you may have noticed all the big companies that have been hacked like the Forbes 100: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and Microsoft.

This is disturbing evidence of an extraordinary time for successful hacking attacks: I can’t recall when we saw so many large, important companies announcing that they’ve been successfully attacked.

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By Vic Hargrave

If you’ve been on Facebook or other social networking services for any length of time you’ve probably received friend requests from people you don’t know at all. This can happen to you even if your Facebook information is only visible to your immediate friends. Some of those friends may have exposed their information more publicly than you have, so strangers with whom they may have connected can see your profile.

Lately, threat researcher Jon Oliver, on whose team I work at Trend Micro, has been getting invitations from people unknown to him. He came up with a very simple method for checking the identity of people trying to friend him that gives a pretty good indication of whether the invitations are sent from real people or fake accounts that are trying to scam you.

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By Shannon McCarty-Caplan

Some people lose their phones, others have had them stolen.  I just break mine.  Not from dropping it in the toilet or breaking the screen, I somehow end up with mobile “lemons.”  I’ve replaced my phone four times in my two-year mobile contract period.

My Droid X had several problems, several times.  My carrier sent me a “like new” replica each time, but I had to set-up my phone again, and again, and again.  And in that process, I sadly lost files I had been building up for months and even years.

During my last set-up, as usual, the Google Android operating system used my Gmail account to bring in all of my Google contacts, Gmail and Google calendar from the cloud onto my phone, and my server based work emails, contacts and calendar also carried over.  But I still lost all of my new contacts created over the last 2 years.  Why?

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By Richard Medugno

When I claim to be a psychic, my family and friends roll their eyes.  I’ve frequently heard the expression “even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in awhile.”  That may be why I love saying, “I told you so” so much.

Last fall, I wrote a blog titled: Mac Users Could End Up with Rotten Apples. Can you imagine the validation I felt when I read yesterday’s San Jose Mercury News article with the headline “Apple hack shows growing vulnerability for Macs”?

We at Trend Micro have seen sophisticated attacks targeting Macs before.

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