News for the Week of April 17, 2005

Sober Worm's Back

It isn't the tip-top story in tech news this week, but an important heads-up for any family with a computer or two at their house: A new version of a particularly nasty worm is circulating the Internet again, the Sober.M or Sober-N, depending on the report. Its mission: harvesting as many email addresses as possible, ZDNET UK reports. Its writers want to sell our addresses to spammers (junk emailers). Tell everyone not to open any email with the subject: "I've_got your EMail on my_account!" and definitely not to click on the attachment in it that it says has copies of your email in it. The attachment is the worm, of course, and "when opened, the attachment scans files on the infected computer to harvest email addresses that enable the worm to spread," according to TechWorld.com. The other thing to do: Make sure your anti-virus software is up to date. McAfee, Symantec, etc. reportedly all have this one covered.

Privacy & ID Theft

The top story of the week (possibly the year) is personal data theft. I'm not calling it identity theft, which is the larger ongoing story that lawmakers are beginning to address, because the widely reported case this week involved "information involving 1.4 million credit cards and 96,000 check transactions" stolen from computers at DSW Shoe Warehouse, a retailer with 108 stores, Reuters reports. The Associated Press added that the theft, which was 10 times greater than investigators originally estimated, "did not include home addresses or personal identification numbers" (see this article). You may have seen similar reports about other retailers, as well as theft of more detailed, personal info from LexisNexis and ChoicePoint, which, among other services, do background checks for businesses.

The online-family part of this story is securing the personal information on our family PCs. With busy young surfers using the PC all the time, that involves a family discussion about not ever sharing personally identifiable info (full name, address, school name, team name, phone no., etc.) in email, IM, blogs, Web sites, etc. A helpful primer the Washington Post recently ran has some great talking points. One cardinal rule is to be wary of what we click to from emails and instant messages, even if they seem to be from a friend - check with your friend in a separate email or new IM window to make sure s/he sent that link or file. BTW, Slate.com has suggestions on what to do if you think your ID has been stolen.