Surfing the internet is a part of our everyday life…..we turn to the “net” to get everything from information on our competitors to making dinner reservations……however, surfing has a new threat that you need to be aware of…..hackers are always looking for ways to wreak havoc on your computer and now they’ve found another strategy…..it’s called scareware and the things it could do to your computer should scare you.

Hackers are creating booby traps on the internet to infect your computer and then sell you bogus software to supposedly fix the infection. You will be stuck in a never ending series of pop-ups until you eventually click and buy the software they want you to buy. The software they sell you will not fix the problem, so you end up spending $40 to $80 dollars and end up with an infected pc. In many cases, clicking and buying just makes the pop-ups increase.

By late last year, more than 9,200 different types of scareware programs were circulating on the Internet, up from 2,800 at midyear, according to The Anti-Phishing Working Group.

You can pick up some scareware in many locations……on YouTube the bad guys are signing up and posting comments on videos with enticing links. You watch a video you like, click on the link to another video and bam….you have a bad case of scareware.

In a variation, the bad guys create Twitter accounts and begin broadcasting tweets with enticing links and when you click on the link, you get the same result.

To set a trap in search engines, the hackers post web pages that are optimized with popular key words. This is caused by websites that don’t do a good job of keeping their www sites safe. 91% of websites have vulnerabilities that can be exploited and only 1% have a prevention plan.

Last but not least, hackers buy ad space on popular websites. Generally, they will use an intermediary such as an agency. They mix booby trapped ads with clean ads.

Many of these schemes are originating overseas, however some start right here in the US. In 2008, Microsoft and Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna filed civil lawsuits against Branch Software and Alpha Red, both US companies, charging that they were marketing scareware.
The top-level suppliers, however, continue to operate with impunity, mainly based in Russia. And new affiliates crop up every day, full of fresh ideas to spread increasingly invasive promotions…

So what can you do? AVG’s free LinkScanner tool will help to prevent you from clicking on malicious Web links. AVG has a quality product and it is free.

What should businesses do? They need their www sites to be scanned to find the traps that have been set. Visit G.1440 to learn more about how to protect your business.

The Examiner newspaper said goodbye to Baltimore this weekend with its final edition. Ad revenue wasn’t enough to keep the free paper in circulation. At the Baltimore sun, circulation is down and more than 200 jobs have been cut in the last 18 months. Reports indicate that on a national basis, overall newspaper based readership is down about 3% from last year.

The interesting side to all of this and the story you aren’t hearing much about is that online news sites are dramatically growing in readership. According to a recent Nielsen online survey, online readership on the top 10 news www sites is up an average of 16% with 40 million unique visitors in December 2008. This is up from 34 million in December of 2007. Total viewers peaked at 252 million in the same period, compared to 199 million in December 2007.

Our desire to be informed appears to be growing. From being connected via PDA, cell, internet to print – we want to be up to date. What is changing is how we get our news. Personally, I get a ton of news on my phone and via email alerts. The convenience of online is hard to beat. Online news is real time and can be targeted to a specific person via personalized alerts. Another major factor is that internet news is free.

What does this mean to newspapers? The dominant trend is get news online, so newspapers need to follow that trend and continue to shift more resources to their online presence. How to shift the business model is going to be a challenge. It is difficult to name more than a few online news outlets that have “figured it out”. Most appear to have a loyal following for specific content either at the national (Wall Street Journal) or the local news level.

There has been some discussion regarding the charging for access to news content or charging micropayments. Micropayments would involve charging by the story in a manner similar to the iTunes method of charging by the song. Either business model will be difficult to make profitable as most news stories are carried by multiple outlets and if one continues to offer free news, it will impossible for the other news agencies to charge for the same story.

The green movement is also making the use of paper frowned upon when another means of delivery is possible.

All of these signals are pointing to the need for news organizations to move to online delivery and to determine a valuable niche that can generate profits. The most successful organizations are going to figure it out soon and capture this trend to their advantage.