The latest phishing scam, focussing on the approaching tax return deadline has apparently been sent out to tens of thousands of prospective victims.

Scammers are getting increasingly clever about the methods they use to try and get users to visit a page and enter in their cred card details. Unsuspecting victims enter the site believing it to be a genuine tex return site, where they end up entering their credit card details, address, phone number and a whole host of other information.

Revenue and Customs has warned people not to respond to the emails being sent around as it only informs users of a refung by post.

No big surprise here but the recent increase in the smart phone market has triggered hackers and cybercriminals to dust off some old tricks to try and install diallers and other exploits on smart phones.

People that fall into the traps of installing applications on smartphones end up with software that dials out to premium rate phone lines. Leaving the victim of such attacks with enormous phone bills and little or no way of retrieving a refund.

The diallers are mainly found on mobile porn sites, so if you are into that kind of thing, be careful and don’t download anything unless you are absolutely sure it’s safe to do so.

Google might well be pulling out of China this week after news that they were subjected to a sophisticated synchronised attack.

Google and other security experts have indicated that the attacks are from China itself (ie the PRC) and are much more advanced than the normal attacks received by normal isolated hackers.

The attacks targeted Chinese human rights activists worldwide and it’s fairly obvious from people in the know that the hackers were backed by a nation state.

It’s unfortunate that the Chinese government continues it’s efforts to isolate itself from the rest of the world. One thing is for sure: the PRC isn’t making itself any friends globally.

In what looks like another DNS hack, China’s biggest search engine “Baidu” has been hacked.. Users who visit the site were redirected to another political message.

In a way it’s a bit of a relief that the hackers didn’t use the opportunity to launch a massive phishing scam.. literally millions of people’s data would have been compromised if this was the case, making it one of the biggest hacks ever.

It’s not immediately clear how the “Cyber Army” (probably a fat guy in his mums basement) got access to the dns records, but I’m quite sure there are a few hundreds of people looking into it.

A new world record has been set where Pi (3.1415..) has been calculated to 2.7 Trillion digits. Whats perhaps more interesting is that it was completed by a simple desktop computer. This kind of thing is usually taken up by a supercomputer specially designed for crunching vast amounts of data.

If a simple desktop computer can work this out imagine how complex encryption need to be nowadays in order to keep one step ahead of would be attackers. With so much processing power at your disposal it’s becoming increasingly plausible for someone to crack higher levels of encryption.

Admittedly it was a pretty decent one with an i7 running at 2.93Ghz and 6GB of RAM. It also used up 1.5 Terabytes of data just on the number itself.