The amount of computers nefariously “hijacked” by malicious hackers to spew out spam and spread viruses has soared almost 30% in the twelve months, according to security firm Symantec.
The security bigwigs reported that more than six million bot-infected computers were detected during the second half of 2006, with over a third of all computer attacks originating from US-based PCs.
Despite this growth, the number of bot ‘command-and-control’ servers shrunk by around 25% to 4,700, pointing to a more centralised system for unleashing bot-tastic attacks.
Symantec blames the rise in infected computers on the growing online population of countries like China and Spain, with Ollie Whitehouse, senior consulting services director, commenting, “There is almost an educational curve that the users and service providers have to go through. Unfortunately when certain countries go through rapid increases in connectivity and availability of technology that curve is not always kept up.”
The company also noted that ‘underground economy servers’ were being being used by dodgy perps to flog stolen personal information, including credit cards, bank cards, PIN numbers and other forms of ID.
Just over half of all identity theft-related data breaches were also found to have resulted from the loss or theft of computer hardware (like a laptop, USB memory stick, removable storage).
“As cyber criminals become increasingly malicious, they continue to evolve their attack methods to become more complex and sophisticated in order to prevent detection,” warned Arthur Wong, senior vice president, Symantec Security Response and Managed Services.
“End users, whether consumers or enterprises, need to ensure proper security measures to prevent an attacker from gaining access to their confidential information, causing financial loss, harming valuable customers, or damaging their own reputation,” he added.
Like hungry puppies with sharp teeth, Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari Web browsers continue to chew and gnaw away at the juicy legs of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE).
“After a minor hiccup in January, Firefox seems to be back on the offensive in February,” said the fabulously named Vincent Vizzaccaro, Net Applications’ executive vice president of marketing and strategic relationships.
Looking deeper, deeper, deeper into his shiny orb (oo-er), the beardy Cerf revealed that it won’t be personal computers fuelling the growth of the internet. Instead he reckons that the expansion of the worldwide web will be powered by mobile phones, with countries like India snapping up zillions of the fellas and getting online en masse.
“The mobile phone has become an important factor in the Internet revolution,” he added.
The Answer
The Fully-Fledged Feed Reader
Two notebooks containing work by Leonardo da Vinci, know as the Codices, have been digitally reunited today at the launch of Windows Vista.
It’s written under a pen name, Obadiah Shoher, as Israeli law criminalizes racism and incitation. With this knowledge you have some sort of idea as to the views that are put across.
In ye olde days, spammers just used to send out bucket loads of text-based emails, but these were proving progressively less effective against smarter anti-spam software employing tricks such as dictionary-based content filters.
All spam is annoying, but with its bundled images, this new technique adds a double whammy of gobbling up more precious bandwidth to deliver its spam-tastic cargo.
Sadly, the root of the problem with spam is the chumps who keep on responding and buying the dubious wares on offer (a bit like the mad fools who come down to Brixton to buy ‘drugs’).
Samsung has launched what it claims is the first mobile phone in the known universe to come with an optical joystick.
The slide-open phone also comes with an illumination sensor which automatically controls the brightness of the LCD screen and keypad, so you won’t be dazzled if the phone goes off in the middle of the night.
MySpace and Cingular Wireless have pressed the flesh and announced an exclusive partnership to offer enhanced MySpace functionality to all Cingular mobile users.
MySpace Mobile also lets users post to their MySpace blogs when they’re on the move, as well as add friends to a contact list for quick bookmarking.
With last week’s launch of it’s TV over the Internet service, a raft of integrated net-based services and a slew of new hardware devices, BT has relauched itself as a multi-media service provider instead of a plain old utility company. The BT Internet Radio shows another face of BT’s rebranding. It’s a slickly designed consumer electrical product aimed directly at the growing digital radio sector.
Choosing between stations is a bit of a hit and miss affair. If your tastes tend towards anything beyond the mainstream categorizations (rock, pop, dance, hip hop etc) you’ll struggle to find the music you want to hear. This, of course, isn’t BT’s fault. The device uses the Reciva Internet Portal to aggregate its stations. If you access the Reciva Website (
The device can access and playback MP3 or other audio files from a networked PC. An extremely useful feature and one that really capitalizes on the network power of the unit. It probably would have done the most to sell this device to me. In practice it was unable to connect to my PC so I had to leave the feature untested. Typically, macs are not supported and I was unable to access my sizable MP3 collection via either of the macs on the network. It’s not surprising that BT have chosen to adopt Windows technology for integration with computers but it is disappointing that they couldn’t have adopted an interoperable standard which would have supported any operating system.