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General July 24, 2020

Facebook advertising at its best

It is known that the Facebook advertising is very aggressive sometimes and that it very often fails. Very often I find strange ads and I click on the details in order to to see why was it displayed to me. If you click on Hide Ad: And then, for example, click on “Irrelevant”:   Then, you can click on “Why did I see this ad?”. I found very strange to see one ad for some kind of sales training and process improving (?!). To my surprise, I’ve seen that the ad was targeting “Star Wars” fans… :))   The other two requirements are always the same: – 18+ – location Germany     So, is this intended and there is actually some study that shows that Star Wars fans are more inclined to buy consulting for improving sales ? What do you think ?    

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security October 27, 2014

Why Facebook video autoplay is potentially dangerous, useless and how you can deactivate it

If you want to skip my rant about security and see how to do this, jump to the HOW TO areas below. Why Facebook video autoplay is potentially dangerous? Here are a couple of reasons why I think that autoplaying a video is potentially dangerous: – Facebook videos use on Windows Adobe Flash Player to render. I am not sure what they use on mobile devices where there is no Flash. I guess that If the browser supports HTML5 than uses it, if not, then there is no rendering. According to Secunia, FlashPlayer is on top 5 from 50 on the most vulnerable software. Now, imagine that someone finds a vulnerability in the player that can be exploited with a special video file. Guess what would happen… by default … Everyone who has this feature active, and this means everybody who DIDN’T manually deactivate it, will be affected. Yes, it is probably not realistic to have something like this… but also SSL was considered bulletproof. – Some people use Facebook at work and imagine that a video with content not recommended for office starts to play automatically. Fortunately,, the audio is by default off, so no  reason to raise attention with…

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Spam & Phishing October 8, 2014

“Your messages will be deleted soon” – Facebook spam

It seems that the most research on social engineering is done these days by spammers. Using the text “You haven’t been to Facebook for a few days, and a lot happened while you were away”, the spam message contains the trigger which will make many people click on the message: “Your messages will be deleted soon” Ohhhh, so, if you don’t click on “View messages” then the messages will be deleted?. This is a good one. To all those who really think that something like this is possible: Stay calm, nobody is ever going to delete your messages. And, Facebook is not sending you such messages anyway. It is just a spam that redirects you to an online pharmacy store.

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Uncategorized February 21, 2014

Facebook, WhatsApp and the new Internet bubble

I was reading the great news about the 19 billion USD which Facebook paid for WhatsApp. I want to underline, that 1 year ago, Google wanted to buy it for… 1 billion USD: http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/08/as-google-acquisition-rumors-grow-is-whatsapp-really-worth-a-billion-dollars/ And in December 2013, http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/12/19/whatsapp-hits-400-million-users-wants-to-stay-independent/ WhatsApp has “no plans to sell, IPO, exit, [get new] funding,” Koum said. “Despite the fact that we’re able to monetize today, we’re not focused on monetization,” Koum said. “We view monetization as five, 10 years down the road. We’re trying to build a sustainable company that’s here for the next 100 years.” Koum said WhatsApp has attracted new users without spending on marketing.   I found some articles which say something like: The huge price tag attached to Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp — one of the largest web deals in history — actually makes more sense than you might think at first glance.   What? No company is so much worth! And especially not an instant messaging company. Some facts:(read here the details). – the company is 5 years old – it has 450 million users. – It has 400 Million active monthly users   – July 2013 it had 200 million active monthly users – 100 M from them joined in the last…

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techblog November 27, 2012

Post Cyber Monday thoughts

Now that the Cyber Monday and Black Friday madness of buying at reduced prices is almost over, we expect to see the spam and scam campaigns related to these events. Every year, in the last week of November the two events bring into our inboxes a lot of spam and scams trying to make use of the buying frenzy of the unaware users. With the continuous growth of the social media websites like Twitter, Facebook and others, we see also a lot of such offers published there as well. The campaigns have started about a week before the Black Friday, trying to lure users to buy various things at unbelievable prices. Now, being in the middle of the week, we are seeing spams containing offers related to various opportunities of reselling the goods which were bought during this time and are not wanted by their owners. Exactly the same is happening after Christmas until middle of January every year. All these have something in common: social engineering and greed. I think that anyone would click on an offer if he sees a product which he wants since a lot of time, but it was too expensive to purchase. If below the…

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googleplus July 13, 2011

Google Plus and usability (part 1): can’t write a message to a single person

So, I finally got an invitation to use the Google Plus. I will not comment about this service because a lot has been written, but I will comment on its usability. Here are the most nerving issues which the Product Managers from Google seem to have not understood: I want to write to a friend a direct message without having to create a circle with only 1 user. I click on the name and I expect to be able to interact with the user.                 And surprise… there is no way to do this … To compare it with Facebook, if you click on a username, you can write on the Wall of the respective person. Will write more here 🙂

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Uncategorized May 18, 2011

Vote for my pictures

Click on this link: http://www.breitling.com/contest/vote.php?u=658025144 Login on Facebook and vote my pictures either one by one  or all at once: http://apps.facebook.com/breitling/votepic.php?id=3648 http://apps.facebook.com/breitling/votepic.php?id=3647 http://apps.facebook.com/breitling/votepic.php?id=3646 http://apps.facebook.com/breitling/votepic.php?id=3645   If I get enough votes I might get a voucher to get a flight license.   This is how you vote: 1. Go here: http://www.breitling.com/contest/vote.php?u=658025144 2. You are asked to login to Facebook. Please login. 3. You are presented this page: Depending on your Facebook settings, you might have to Like the page first and then click on Vote in order to see the photos.   4. Click on each picture. Note that you will see on you Facebook Wall that you voted for me.  

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antivirus, News, Spam & Phishing August 17, 2010

Quoted by softpedia.com

Softpedia took again one of my posts in the Avira Techblog and wrote an article based on it: “In the recent past we saw emails looking like phishing mails, which were spam though actually. The spammers tried to make them look as much as possible as official mails from the entity they were faking: Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, and so on,” Sorin Mustaca, manager of international software development at Avira, warns. “[Full name] has sent you a message” the rogue communication, which appears to originate from Facebook, reads. However, instead of the actual message, the recipient is presented with an image promoting various male enhancement pills. “We checked about 100 different emails in this category and all of them use the same domain. We were curious and investigated who owns the domain – the domain is registered in China by a single registrar who owns 14 thousands other domains,” Mr. Mustaca notes.

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