if you use a windows account...

if you use a windows account capable of wiping your entire hard drive in order to play farmville, then you might be a security idiot.

... and all i got...

@chort0 tweeted about this merchandise he dreamt up and made at cafepress. before he made it on cafepress i almost did it for him because i thought it would be a cool thing to do and i certainly wanted to post about it here. so i almost did it, but then at the very last moment i decided it would be better if he made his ideas into reality himself - and besides, i've got enough of my own ideas for shirts and the like.

backup early, backup often

backup early, backup often

one of the most overlooked, easiest, and most useful things you can do in security is maintain regular backups. maybe if this catch phrase actually catches we can change the first part of that and make this less overlooked.

count duqu

from here

i know i'm not the only making fun of the stuxnet derivative called duqu, in fact i think it might be it's own little meme all by itself.

nick helm's password joke

a little while back a comedian named nick helm won an award for funniest joke at the edinburgh fringe festival, and that joke happened to focus on one of the most recognized concepts in all of security - passwords.

I needed a password eight characters long so I picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

apparently it wasn't the only joke referencing security concepts either. the top 10 list of them also includes one referencing crime, and another referencing the phone 'hacking' case that was attracting so much attention earlier this year.

SIRI how could you?

thanks to @ABlakeley for tweeting this

i think this underscores an important problem with speech recognition technology in mobile devices - the more sophisticated the capabilities become the worse the problem of unauthorized commands issued by those around you becomes. remember, speech recognition is not the same as voice recognition. one recognizes the words, the other recognizes who is saying them.

when spam hams it up

there isn't really a good way for me to share this one without simply linking to this cracked article on 100 unintentionally hilarious spam subject lines, but i still want to give you a taste of what you'll find there:

16. Look, random spam subject line writers, you need to know that there are certain words that just kill the porn mood...

• chippendale champion auschwitz

it's all words, of course, so i think it's safe for work, but your mileage may vary.
(thanks to @javiermerchan and @panda_security for bringing it to my attention)

what a hackable world

thanks to @CiscoSecurity for tweeting this. nice to see that when some people do a parody they actually bother to record it, rather than just writing down the words (unlike me).

yo dawg, i heard you like viruses

from here

i just couldn't resist. it was too meta to pass up.

don't scan this meme

from here

i was trying to figure out which of the meme characters would be appropriate for this very old joke about the cascade virus (141$Flu was the signature a particular AV product used to detect the virus) and then it struck me - it's a pun, so lame pun coon becomes the obvious choice.