What a week for being in Boston! I was heading to Source Conference the very same day the blast happened. It�s hard to describe all the intense emotions when I arrived. As president Obama said today to the city of Boston: �You will run again�. All my best to you guys, stay strong.

In my presentation in Source I talked about fraud in Twitter. These days we find a lot of spam bots in this social network, both blindly sending unsolicited direct messages to other users or doing some previous semantic analysis, depending on your tweets, for a more targeted message.

Phishing is not exactly a ground-breaking technique. Quite the opposite, it seems like it has been around forever. This is an indicator of its effectiveness: we might think that it is unlikely that people would give away their banking credentials just because they are asked for them, but still there is a percentage who continue to become victims of one of the simplest fraud methods.

However both user awareness and anti-phishing tools are making harder for fraudsters to succeed in their attempts to get our money. We see this changing in the decrease in the percentage of spam. That is not the only reason: users are switching to new platforms such as social networks for direct communication.

Today I want to show you an example of the creativeness in avoiding spam and phishing filters.

When we upload something embarrassing about ourselves to, let�s say Facebook, that�s completely our fault. But there are other subtle ways to get information about us. Let�s say a few words about tracking.

Every time you visit a website you request HTML that will be rendered in your local browser. This code may include external references, so you will request them as well. Nothing to be afraid of so far.

This week I attended the Gartner Symposium in Barcelona. The event is for IT leaders and executives, held in a magnificent venue and superbly organized.

Having the chance of giving a talk there, I wondered what kind of message should I give to such attendees. These people lead big companies and get regular reports from the best analyst in the world. During the conference basically they will get tons of information, and I wanted my message to remain in their minds, so I decided to go for a practical approach.