Worm, virus problem solved

According to InformationWeek, less emphasis should be placed on worms and viruses, and more on phishing and other attempts to steal data and money.

Symantec chairman and CEO John Thompson declares the problem of "worms and viruses is solved".

"IM is becoming the new threat vector," says Seth Shestack, acting chief information security officer for Temple University. "Telling students they can`t have access to IM is like telling a bank they can`t use money."

Techdigest says a McAfee report illustrates that celeb sites in general are the number one place for fans to be infected with malicious software.

Traditionally porn sites were blamed for much of this, but McAffee`s survey suggests that such sites have fallen to a lowly third place overall.

Celebrity sites (fake ones, at least) at number one, and screen saver sites at number two. Many search engine queries on famous names led straight to malicious sites.

Home computers can be attacked by hackers more than 50 times a night, an experiment has shown, says Guardian Unlimited.

The experiment, carried out by the BBC News Web site, used a "honeypot" PC, which looked like a normal computer to potential hackers but secretly recorded every attempt to gain access to it.

Each time the machine was put online during the month-long test period, it came under attack from hackers or dangerous computer programmes. In one of the busiest nights of malicious activity, it was attacked 53 times.

The Liberty Alliance, whose members include service providers like AOL and American Express, has unveiled the final version of the Identity Web Services Framework (ID-WSF) 2.0, InternetNews reports.

ID-WSF 2.0, a schema for building secure, interoperable Web services that can be piped over the Internet, was originally developed to transmit secure transactions between large businesses, the report says.

The schema now takes social-networking sites into consideration, allowing consumers and organisations to establish privacy controls, enabling them to guard against phishing, pharming and other forms of online identity theft while they share information on social networking sites, it says.