Don’t be surprised if you see a drop-off in "John Doe is the worst boyfriend ever"-style status updates on Facebook starting this week.  Facebook has introduced two measures designed to make sure no one other than an account’s rightful owner is able to take control of it.

If privacy concerns weren’t enough to get people thinking about deleting their Facebook accounts, they also have security concerns to consider. As Facebook takes over the web, user information goes with it. One can only imagine the potential threats that are lurking around the corner.

McAfee and Adgregate have partnered on what they’re calling the industry’s first secure advertising. WebProNews spoke with Brent Remai, VP of Consumer Marketing at McAfee about what this means for advertising.

Vietnam shares a border with China, and it’s possible that Vietnamese authorities are starting to share the Chinese government’s low opinion of Google, too.  Today, a spokesperson dismissed Google’s claim that Vietnamese computer users were infected by politically motivated malware.

Easter is coming up, and of course that means spammers are taking advantage. They do this with most holidays. And like they do with other holidays, they are using the holiday to disguise malicious emails. Symantec shared some examples with us.

"MessageLabs Intelligence has intercepted Easter ‘e-card’ spam emails offering a ’2010 Easter 3D e-Card,’" a representative for Symantec tells WebProNews. "Spam authors are attempting to use the recent surge of interest in 3D media to increase the likelihood of people falling for their scam."

Google said it has detected malware targeting Vietnamese-language users opposed to bauxite mining in the Communist country.

The malware infected the computers of "potentially tens of thousands of users" who downloaded Vietnamese keyboard language software, Google Security Team member Neel Mehta wrote on the company’s security blog. The attacks targeted opposition to the mining of bauxite, an ore used to make aluminum.

Symantec has a released a new report looking at the nature of industrial espionage and targeted attacks, a big issue right now, considering the whole Google/China situation. A representative for the firm tells WebPronews, "Further analysis of targeted attacks shows that the top five targeted roles are senior officials (VPs, Directors) and the individuals that receive the most targeted malware are responsible for foreign trade and defense policy, especially in relation to Asian countries."

Google introduced a new security feature for Gmail today. It notifies the user when a suspicious log-in activity is detected on their account. This notification will come in the form of a message saying ""Warning: We believe your account was last accessed from…" along with the geographic region that Google can best associate with the access. Engineering Director Pavni Diwanji explains on the Gmail Blog:

Something fishy is going on. If you search for "Google executives" on an English-language version of Google, you may get a link to http://www.google.com/corporate/execs.html, which would be Google’s page where it has profiles for its executives (go figure). However, you may also notice that the text appears in Chinese characters.

Clicking on links that different people send can often be a cross-your-fingers experience, considering that there are malicious tricksters, unknowing victims, and hijacked accounts to watch out for.  So Twitter’s attempting to make the experience less dangerous by checking (and sometimes rewriting) the links found in direct messages and email notifications.

Our Twellow team has been working hard on getting Twellow set up to use Twitter’s OAuth system, and that support is now available on Twellow.com.

"The Twellow OAuth upgrade is a major improvement for Twellow users," Twellow’s Lead Developer Matthew Daines says. "Not only is it much more secure, but it also increases the amount of interaction users can have with the Twitter universe from Twellow."

Symantec’s MessageLabs tells WebProNews there is a new targeted attack using emails pretending to be from the New York Times. MessageLabs Intelligence tracked the attack yesterday, which used emails pretending to come from the NYT’s "Times Reader" software, hitting six different domains. One domain was a public sector domain, one was a law firm, and three were to chemical companies, and one was an online gambling company in the UK.

Update: The Financial Times is reporting that the writer of the code used in the infamous attacks on Google and other companies has allegedly been identified. The publication’s Joseph Menn writes:

Update: Fousquare has issued a respons to the attention PleaseRobMe has brought to potential privacy issues associated with location sharing. What it boils down to is that Foursquare "takes privacy seriously" and it’s "really a bigger question about the pros and cons of location sharing in general". Read the company’s entire response here.

Update: WebProNews contacted Google to find out how they handle Google Buzz spam. The company tells us:

"We have several spam and abuse checks in place for Google Buzz content. On the abuse side, we recompress images that are uploaded, and links are scanned by the same technology that helps protect Google web search and browsers that implement our Safe Browsing data. Users can also click "Report abuse" in the drop-down menu for each Buzz message. We will suspend accounts for abuse that violates our terms of service."

Google just introduced message log search for Postini, its group of cloud security and archiving services.

Update 4: Google has reportedly now teamed up with the National Security Agency to analyze the attack and try to better defend against such attacks in the future.