The New York Times' report Monday of state-sponsored hacking in China drew new attention to the sophisticated techniques that would-be infiltrators use to gain access to victims' accounts. But it's not just China, Google said today -- the techniques used against U.S. government agencies and corporations are being used increasingly by hackers around the world.

"Compared to five years ago, more scams [and] illegal, fraudulent, or spammy messages today come from someone you know," security engineer Mike Hearn said in a blog post. "Although spam filters have become very powerful -- in Gmail, less than 1 percent of spam e-mails make it into an in-box -- these unwanted messages are much more likely to make it through if they come from someone you've been in contact with before. As a result, in 2010 spammers started changing their tactics -- and we saw a large increase in fraudulent mail sent from Google Accounts."

Google says that to get around spam filters, spammers are breaking into legitimate accounts and sending mail to that account's contacts. And the attacks can be quite serious.

"We've seen a single attacker using stolen passw... [Read more]

(Credit: Jason Cipriani/CNET)

Last November I covered a new service called Sunrise. The goal of the service, after connecting it to your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google Calendar accounts, was to help you start the day with a personalized agenda in your inbox. It would incorporate details about upcoming meetings, as well as who you're meeting with, from the various services.

While having an organized agenda automatically created for you each morning with important details was intriguing, after using the service for a few weeks the e-mail started to feel more like spam than a helpful digital assistant.

Fast-forward to today: Sunrise has released an iPhone calendar app. The app -- which is free -- aims to replace the native Calendar app on your device, both in looks and function.

When you first launch the app you'll be asked to log in with your Facebook account, in turn placing Facebook Events and Birthdays into your calendar. Then you'll have a chance to connect LinkedIn and your Google Calendar.

With your accounts added, you can accept Facebook Event invites, post happy birthday wishes, organize your Google Calendar, and learn about who you're meeting with based off of his or her LinkedIn profile. Need ... [Read more]

The Portable Document Format is one of the more ubiquitous document types both on the Web and on personal devices, and can be used for distributing manuals, brochures, and most other formatted documents.

However, until now Firefox, one of the more popular Web browsers, in part due to its availability on OS X, Windows, and Linux, has not had a built-in PDF reader. Instead, to open PDFs it's been necessary to either install a browser plug-in or download the PDFs and open them in a managing program like Apple's Preview.

However, in the latest version of Firefox, Mozilla has included a native PDF viewer that ought to make possible quick and complete viewing of PDFs without the need for other programs and plug-ins.

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In Firefox 19, released this morning, if you open a PDF either from a Web link or from your hard drive, it will appear in the browser in a simple but efficient interface that has options for zooming (manually or automatically), viewing a PDF in a full-screen presentation mode, navigating to specific pages by number, and scrolling through t... [Read more]