McAfee AVERT Labs has posted a humorous (but cautionary) tale of a scam targeting Brazilian users. The scam involves a promise of cheap $1 airfare, but delivers a password stealing trojan that  could wipe out your bank account. For details, see: Fly for $1 or Your Money Back!

In Can Adobe Beat Back the Hackers, BusinessWeek claims "as Microsoft has toughened up its security, Adobe has become a more tempting prey."

In reality, it has little to do with improvements in Microsoft security - attackers moved to Adobe because attacks moved to the Web. Adobe Flash and Adobe Reader (PDF) are ubiquitous Web-enabling apps and Adobe's lack of security in their product line has made it painfully easy for these attacks to succeed.

According to survey results from Competitive Edge Research, Mac users are as prone to phishing attacks as are PC users. Unfortunately, the report concluded that "most cybercrime losses are caused by phishing attacks" - a finding that might be erroneous at best. Perhaps a more accurate conclusion would be that most quantifiable reports of losses are the result of phishing. In any event, it does serve as a good reminder that  scams are a universal problem - they target the person directly and not the operating system.

Sunbelt Software is warning of a new phishing scam, this one targeting Apple MobileMe users. The bogus email masquerades as a subscription expiration from Apple's MobileMe service.  The phishing scam uses a spoofed From address of Mobile IDisk [noreply01@me.com] [mailto:noreply01@me.com].

A copy of the MobileMe phishing email is available on the Sunbelt blog.

Research from the University of New South Wales indicates one defenses against email scams and phishing attacks may just be reading your email when you're feeling a bit down.