China houses largest number of bot infected PCs

China has accounted for 26 percent of the world's bot infected computers, a higher density than any other nation with Beijing as the city with the most bot infected computers in the world.

During the second half of 2006 period, Symantec observed an average of 21,707 new active bot infected computers per day in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

The U.S. remains both a center and target of cybercrime. 86% of the credit and debit cards advertised for sale on the digital underground were issued by banks in the U.S.

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SanDisk Introduces 8GB Camera Flash Card

SanDisk introduced an 8GB SD High Capacity version which is twice that of the highest capacity now available in the SD format.

The new card is estimated to hold more than 4,000 high res pictures and as many as 2,000 digital songs or up to 15 hours of MPEG 4 video.

The 8GB SDHC card with USB reader will be available in April in the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

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Should spyware be illegal?

Members of a committee of the US Congress have received much support for a proposed spyware ban. But some who fear the bill, without some modifications, could harm internet advertisers.

The Securely Protect Yourself Against Cyber Trespass Act (Spy Act) would make it unlawful to install software that gathers information, monitors usage, serves up advertisements or modifies browser and other settings on a computer without explicit user consent.

Without some modifications, the bill would "take into account and cover things that are part of the seamless use of the Internet" and which provide advertising-supported content to millions said Jerry Cerasale, senior vice president of government affairs at the Direct Marketing Association.

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Google to tighten its privacy

Google said yesterday that it plans to alter its privacy policy and strip certain identifying information from archived Internet searches. The new policy will affect only searches conducted from the Google home page.

Google will continue to store search terms, but after 18 to 24 months it will remove the IP addresses, which can help identify the location of computers that conducted searches. Google will also erase cookies on hard drives after searches are conducted.

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Seagate releases super secure hard drive

The 2.5 inch Momentus 5400 FDE.2 (full disk encryption) drive will be on sale at the end of March. The drive features on the fly encryption integrated into the drive itself using chip acceleration. The user has the power to set a password to access the drive during system boot, but is otherwise unaware that all data at rest is being encrypted and unencrypted transparently. Data is never in clear text except when it is being used by an application.

The drive will be a 80 GB version with a 100GB, 120GB and 160GB version coming soon, all based on a 3Gb/sec SATA interface and spinning at 5400 RPM.

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Samsung releases hybrid hard drive

Samsung's hybrids mix flash technology with regular magnetic hard disk drives, are specially optimized for Windows Vista.

The drive is a 2.5 inch hard drive suitable for notebooks and is available in 80Gb, 120Gb and 160Gb capacities, coming with either 128Mb or 256Mb of Samsung's OneNAND memory.

The MH80 is optimized for Vista and is designed to work with Microsoft's ReadyDrive, which is meant to deliver 50% faster boot and resume times, 20 to 30 minutes of extra battery life depending on the notebook as the drive users 70-90% less power than regular hard drives, and greater reliability as the physical hard drive itself will be used less often thanks to the flash memory.

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Microsoft OneCare not your best bet for protection

When Microsoft launched their anti-virus and Internet Security product OneCare, rival companies were concerned that Microsoft was trying to muscle in on their market. But if the results of both a new test by research firm AV Comparatives and previous tests that ranked Windows Defender relatively lowly are anything to go by.

Microsoft's effort has come last with an average of an 82.4% detection success rate. When the top rated software, G Data Security AntiVirusKit, posts a 99.45% average. Symantec's Norton Anti-Virus came in at 96.8%, GriSoft's AVG was 96.3% and McAfee's VirusScan at 91.6%, meaning that while these big names did much better than OneCare.

The report indicates the methodology of the testing for those wanting the details, which involved a big range of viruses, polymorphic viruses, worms, rootkits, Trojans, scripts, backdoors, spyware and dialers.

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Windows Vista gadgets may pose security threats

Symantec Corp is claiming that the Windows SideBar and gadgets in Windows Vista could pose security threats. The gadgets use static HTML and scripting to allow developers to easily create new plug-ins for the Windows desktop, such as clock or calculator applications.

The gadgets do not automatically execute, but Symantec is concerned that they are automatically authorized to communicate over the Internet, making them an attractive target for attackers.

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