Seems there’s an “industry-wide” attempt to phish passwords from unsuspecting web mail users. As you many know, online email account access is gold for phishers, because they (to paraphrase what I wrote yesterday) the foundation for the online existence of a lot of people. Gain access to a web mail account, and you pretty much gain access to the owner’s social networking accounts, and even more important (and potentially lucrative) services like their PayPal. Impersonating other people is also much easier if you have full control over their web mail.

Google at least hasn’t been sitting on its hands. According to the BBC:

“As soon as we learned of the attack, we forced password resets on the affected accounts. We will continue to force password resets on additional accounts when we become aware of them.”

The firm stressed that the scam was “not a breach of Gmail security” but rather “a scam to get users to give away their personal information to hackers”.

And that’s exactly the point: while I like Gmail more than Hotmail, I don’t think it’s more secure than any other web mail service out there (again, Gmail just provides better functionality). Hopefully incidents like this remind users that they should practice better security, such as using different passwords for their different online accounts, and regularly changing these passwords. I plan to write a quick how to on creating very secure passwords without forgetting about them. Watch out for it soon!

Post from: The Gadget Blog

Courtesy of StatCounter

No doubt, Microsoft’s marketing push has helped. I’m sure Bing has benefited from the relative success of Windows 7 to grab the attention of the more tech-minded, while more casual users probably try Bing out of curiosity.

It remains to be seen if Bing will maintain its momentum. Google after all retains its stranglehold on search at 87.66%. Yet it’s actually lost almost two percent market share over the June 1 – June 4 period (Yahoo lost “only” 0.14%, ending up at 5.17%). If StatCounter is an accurate tracker of US online search habits (the figures cited here only cover that country), and if Bing can manage to sustain its growth over the next few months, Microsoft will definitely have a winner here.

Yahoo, on the other hand, ends up losing face again. A search pioneer drops to third to a relative newcomer.

Post from: The Gadget Blog