New capabilities are strengthening the ZeuS botnet, which criminals use to steal financial credentials and execute unauthorized transactions in online banking, automated clearing house (ACH) networks and payroll systems. The latest version of this cybercrime toolkit, which starts at about $3,000, offers a $10,000 module that can let attackers completely take control of a compromised PC
When we previewed Internet Explorer’s new rendering engine this week we noted that the same features that made IE9’s hardware-acceleration possible probably aren’t compatible with Windows XP. Microsoft initially dodged giving a straight answer to the question of XP support but has since admitted that the new browser won’t be XP-compatible when it launches. This has created a small tempest of protest from those users still using XP, but this is less of an arbitrary decision than some appear to think. It’s literally impossible to port Windows Vista/Win 7-style hardware acceleration backwards into XP. Microsoft would have to either develop a workaround from scratch or create a CPU-driven software mode
. Using such a mode could easily max out a CPU and negatively impact system speed and battery life
Countries should be judged on their willingness to open up public data to their citizens, the inventor of the world wide web has told the BBC. He said openness of data and the neutrality of the network
should be considered as important as free speech. Sir Tim Berners-Lee is an advisor to a UK project — data.gov.uk — that offers reams of previously hidden public sector data for anyone to use. Open data could now be considered a basic right of citizens, he added
Australia’s largest online bargain shopping site, DealsDirect.com.au, was blacklisted by Google and major internet browsers today after it was found to be hosting malware. People visiting the site using Firefox, Google Chrome and newer versions of Internet Explorer were warned that visiting this site may harm your computer
because it appears to host malware
Spam levels have not been dented by a series of strikes against controllers of networks of hijacked computers. Early 2010 has seen four such networks, or botnets, tackled via arrests, net access cutoffs and by infiltrating command systems. The successes have not inconvenienced hi-tech criminals who found other routes to send spam, say experts. And, they add, despite falling response rates, spam remains too lucrative for criminals to abandon
Facebook’s 400 million users have been targeted by a spam run that could infect their computers with malicious software designed to steals passwords and other data, according to security researchers at McAfee. Over the last two days, millions of messages have been sent, which McAfee detected through customers running the company’s security software, said Dave Marcus, McAfee’s director of security research and communication
Greg Combet, minister for Defence Personnel, Materiel and Science, has secured a new Cray supercomputer for the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD). DSD is responsible for foreign signals intelligence and is the Commonwealth’s authority on information, communications and computer security
Researchers, political satirists and partisan mudslingers, take note: C-Span has uploaded virtually every minute of its video archives to the Internet. The archives, at C-SpanVideo.org, cover 23 years of history and five presidential administrations and are sure to provide new fodder for pundits and politicians alike. The network will formally announce the completion of the C-Span Video Library
Spain is becoming the last bastion of common sense when it comes to peer-to-peer and file sharing, at least until the big media companies get their own way and change the law in the country altogether. Torrentfreak, the ever-vigilant blog focusing on BitTorrent and file-sharing issues, points to a recent lawsuit in Spain that ended quite favourably for both P2P users and link sites and dedicated search engines, and that found both use-cases to be perfectly legal in the country
More than 100 drivers in Austin, Texas found their cars disabled or the horns honking out of control, after an intruder ran amok in a web-based vehicle-immobilisation system normally used to get the attention of consumers delinquent in their auto payments. Police with Austin’s High Tech Crime Unit on Wednesday arrested 20-year-old Omar Ramos-Lopez, a former Texas Auto Center employee who was laid off last month, and allegedly sought revenge by bricking the cars sold from the dealership’s four Austin-area lots
Engineers designing the world’s fastest car believe they now have a solution to keep the vehicle flat on the ground. Bloodhound SSC is being built to smash the world land speed record by topping 1,000mph (1,610km/h). Initial iterations of the car’s aerodynamic shape produced dangerous amounts of lift at the vehicle’s rear. But the latest modelling work indicates the team has finally found a stable configuration, allowing the project to push ahead with other design areas
MySpace has taken a bold step and allowed a large quantity of bulk user data to be put up for sale on startup data marketplace InfoChimps. Data offered includes user playlists, mood updates, mobile updates, photos, vents, reviews, blog posts, names and zipcodes. Friend lists are not included. Remember, Facebook and Twitter may be the name of the game these days in tech circles, but MySpace still sees 1 billion user status updates posted every month. Those updates will now be available for bulk analysis
The Feds are on Facebook. And MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter, too. Law enforcement agents are following the rest of the Internet world into popular social-networking services, even going undercover with false online profiles to communicate with suspects and gather private information, according to an internal Justice Department document that surfaced in a lawsuit. The document shows that US agents are logging on surreptitiously to exchange messages with suspects, identify a target’s friends or relatives and browse private information such as postings, personal photographs and video clips
US regulators have unveiled the nation’s first plan to give every American super-fast broadband by 2020. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which has submitted the plan to Congress, said broadband was the greatest infrastructure challenge
. It estimates that one-third of Americans, about 100 million people, are without broadband at home. The FCC’s goal is to provide speeds of 100 megabits per second (Mbps), compared to an average 4Mbps now
In this two-year-old classified Army Counterintelligence Centre report [PDF], American spooks set out to destroy Wikileaks by intimidating its sources. They cite as justification for this the fact that Wikileaks has outed American embarrassments and crimes including US equipment expenditure in Iraq, probable US violations of the Chemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq, the battle over the Iraqi town of Fallujah and human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay
If you still enjoy reading newspapers in a semi-traditional format, Google has a fairly substantial archive of older papers in scanned form that can be searched from its Google News Archives section
The bacterial communities that live on human skin may form a bacterial fingerprint on the items that you touch. In a new study led by microbiologists Rob Knight and Noah Fierer of the University of Colorado, Boulder, researchers swabbed three different keyboards and nine mice for bacteria, then compared the genomic variation between the communities to deduce whose hands had been touching what. The people were clearly identifiable from the bacterial communities they’d transferred to their computer input devices
Are we alone in the universe? That’s the big question the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) seeks to answer, and so far the answer appears to be yes. In the half-century since Frank Drake first used a radio telescope to begin searching for alien radio signals, there has been no message from ET — indeed no artificial radio traffic of any description
The internet celebrates a landmark event on the 15 March — the 25th birthday of the day the first dotcom name was registered
Pipe Networks’ shareholders have voted to approve a $373 million deal that will see the company acquired by TPG Telecom. The acquisition will give TPG an extensive dark fibre network across major Australian business centres, such as Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, and will also give it Pipe Networks’ newly lit-up Sydney to Guam international cable
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