Privacy, Hacking and Virus Alerts

Storm worm authors are blasting the Internet with two types of attacks, and both are aimed at building up their botnet.

You might want to think twice before opening that e-greeting card sent to you via e-mail.

In the past week, two fake video postings have been set up on YouTube to infect users with a Trojan that includes pop-up porn ads, Secure Computing warns.

4,500-plus travel sites in Italy attacked in which stolen customer data is sent to a server in Chicago.

Thursday likely marked the largest proliferation of e-mail virus attacks in more than a year, according to security company Postini.

"These zombie computers could have brought the Web to its knees, and while the resilience of the root servers should be commended, more needs to be done to tackle the root of the problem – the lax attitude of some users towards IT security," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. "Society is almost totally reliant on the Internet for day-to-day communication — it’s ironic that the people who depend on the Web may have been the ones whose computers were secretly trying to bring it down."

Computer virus writers started to use raging European storms on Friday to attack thousands of computers in an unusual real-time assault, head of research at Finnish data security firm F-Secure told Reuters.

"It is definitely a new worm, and it is looking for vulnerable systems

But Metimbers and crew turn the tables on scammers one by one, boomeranging the tricksters’ own tactics to entice them into performing outlandish tasks in desperate pursuit of cash — then trumpeting evidence of the con artists’ naïveté for the online world’s amusement.

First detected late last year, the new attacks directed such massive amounts of spurious data against victim computers that even flagship technology companies could not cope, the report said.