3 Security news updates you may have missed

Malware causes printer outage and gibberish

A malicious program called Milicenso afflicted printers across various offices in the world causing them to print garbled data. India, the US, Europe and South America were the majorly afflicted territories. Milicenso has been used in the past by malicious cyber groups and it has now reared its ugly head again. The program is a ‘malware delivery vehicle for hire’ so it has been spotted several times since 2010. TOI reports that it can spread through email attachments, malicious websites or fake video decoders. Infected machines generated a malicious file in print queues, which in turn converted files in the main directory of the printer into gibberish. Quick Heal detects this file on your machine as Trojan.Milicenso.

Facebook becomes breeding ground for spam

Facebook has mandatorily altered the default mail address for all users. The default email address of every user on Facebook now is their user name followed by ‘@facebook.com’ (For instance, abc@facebook.com). One cannot send emails though, since this is not a web mail service. It is simply a gateway into the Facebook messages folder and one can only receive messages in the Facebook inbox. What it does however, is open a channel for spammers. All they have to do is attach the suffix to common names and bombard them with spam. Facebook should have ideally made this an opt-in feature and should have at least informed people before implementing the change. This ZDNet post describes the situation well.

Facebook’s confusing user report chart

Facebook recently released a rather confusing chart about how it handles user reports. These user reports cover issues pertaining to spam, harassment, privacy violations etc. The User Operations group is divided into 4 teams: Safety, Hate and Harassment, Access and Abusive Content. The group contains hundreds of staffers who are spread across various cities around the world. Here is the detailed chart that Facebook released and it shows the various outcomes that specific complaints would take. This will give you a better idea about what happens when you register a user report over the social network.

Rahul Thadani