Every week this site gets thousands of comments and emails from spammers. I can’t complain. It’s just another week in the life of a blogger. Besides, I have a comment and email spam filter that eliminates over 99.9% of the messages. However, the spam filters can’t stop confused people with compromised reasoning from posting messages that expose their own personal information.

Occasionally we get random emails from people willfully sending us such information. As much as possible, we politely tell them this is a bad idea and try point them in the right direction. This week has been exceptional though. Several people have taken it upon themselves to post credit card numbers, account numbers, names, addresses and even social security numbers to the site.

One poor woman, we’ll call her Susan, writes to tell us that her credit cards were stolen while traveling and that she’d like us to help her freeze her credit card accounts. Since she posted her financial data online, it’s fortunate that she’s already planning to cancel those cards. Another poster, we’ll call him Richard, leaves his name and credit card number for no obvious reason except a cryptic “RE:” Our least favorite commenter, whose real name is Timothy, writes us at length threatening to have his lawyer contact us unless we quit mailing credit card offers to his home. Sorry Tim, but we don’t mail credit card offers and we’ve yet to hear from your lawyer. He also claims to have called us three times.

To make matters worse, ALL of these posts were made to the public comments section of this site! Unfortunately, if you’re one of the people who would post this type of information to the comments section of the blog, you probably aren’t reading this post or any other part of the site where we talk about why NOT to give your personal financial information to anybody other than your financial institution. This can’t be reiterated enough:

• Don’t wear a t-shirt with your name and social security number printed on it.
• Don’t tack financial statements to lampposts.
• And under no circumstances should you post credit card numbers to the comment sections of blogs!

The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) is urging online banks to upgrade their security standards by the end of the year. The FFIEC’s reports state that “single-factor authentication” for online transactions is not enough. The FFIEC is encouraging online institutions to adopt two or more of the these authentication methods for high risk transactions:

• Something the user knows (e.g., password, PIN);
• Something the user has (e.g., ATM card, smart card); and
• Something the user is (e.g., biometric characteristic, such as a fingerprint).

Below are the agency’s key points:

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That is the threat facing many Windows 98 users, effective immediately. Tomorrow Microsoft will officially end support for their Windows 98 product. Users still running Windows 98 will be left out in the cold when if comes to new product updates that keep their computers secure. Between Windows 98 and Windows ME, this affects over 60 million people.
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Look carefully. Have you ever seen an ATM that looks like this?

If you stick your debit card into this machine, you’ve been scammed.
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“With support for its Windows 98 and Windows Millennium Edition operating systems about to expire, Microsoft has given up on the idea of patching a critical security vulnerability in the products, the company announced this week.”

“The flaw has to do with the way Windows Explorer handles the Component Object Model objects used by Windows programs. Attackers could take over a system by tricking users into visiting a Web site that would then connect them to a remote file server.” (Full Story…)

“Mozilla Corporation is confident that its Firefox browser will maintain its security lead over Microsoft’s forthcoming Internet Explorer 7.”

“In the long run, [Firefox] will always be more secure [than Internet Explorer] because we have transparency and we have external contributors,” Christopher Blizzard, a board member for the Mozilla Corporation, said during a session at the Red Hat Summit in Nashville.” (Full Story)

Check out our full review and analysis of FireFox and Internet Explorer