For a few years now, the Linux vs. Microsoft battle has entered a peaceful era with more and more Linux companies signing peace-deals with the evil Redmond giant. However, not everybody is cheap these days and there are a couple of Linux companies that responded with a clear "Hell NO!" to any deal Microsoft offered them.

A new vulnerability has been discovered in Symantec AntiVirus for Macintosh which may allow an user to run arbitrary code as root. An executable used by the Mount Scan feature of Symantec AntiVirus for Macintosh and Norton AntiVirus for Macintosh runs with root access. A member of group admin could replace this executable with code of their choice, and gain user root access.

All of the sudden, a beautiful blonde pops up and she promises to remove her lingerie if you help her. Of course you will. It’s human nature to enjoy a strip show. Especially when it’s free. Unfortunately, there is no free beer and the blonde is interested in your brain. The one on your shoulders.

The nation's three major credit-reporting agencies are now allowing consumers to put a security freeze on their credit report, an option Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon says is an excellent way to prevent identity theft. A security freeze makes a consumer's credit report unavailable to lenders, which means identity thieves would not be able to open new accounts or lines of credit in the consumer's name.

The war against computer malware is far from ending as Trojan writers find new ways to elude the security countermeasures deployed by corporations and end-users alike. The latest trend in Trojan distribution is web hosted malware and this has put the cyber criminals one step ahead of the security vendors.

Secure Computing principal research scientist Dimitri Alperovitch says that “We have seen a steady increase over the last year or so from malware being distributed typically through email now shifting to the Web factor.

It comes as no surprise that hackers have taken advantage of the Halloween spirit and launched a new Storm Trojan spam attack in disguise.  One of the most common spam email invited users to visit a website and download a funny application which creates a dancing skeleton on the user’s desktop.

The   'halloween.exe' is a copy of the Storm Trojan which compromises the user's PC and merges it into a network of computers that can be commandeered remotely by a controlling server.

Although it seems that considerable progress has been made regarding the fight against spyware, the legal representatives in such a battle say a major change of the outcome depends now on the approval of the SpyAct by the US Congress. This would lead to civil fines on companies that distribute spyware to consumers' computersFTC (U.S. Federal Trade Commission) gets the authority to impose such fines. The bill is currently stalled in the Senate.

ESET, the leader in proactive threat protection, announced the introduction of ESET Smart Security, a new, integrated security solution for consumers and small-to-medium-sized businesses. It includes antivirus, antispyware, antispam and firewall features built on ESET’s award-winning advanced heuristic ThreatSense® detection system and the ESET NOD32 scanning engine.

ESET Smart Security combines speed, accuracy and minimal computer system impact to deliver a significant improvement over traditional solutions in the marketplace today. It provides the industry’s highest level of accuracy and fewest false-positives through ESET NOD32 Antivirus . With significantly lower performance overhead compared to the competition, ESET Smart Security uses only 40MB of disk space and scans systems up to 30-times faster than other products.

Although Apple's Leopard operating system is promoted using security and particularly its firewall as killer features, security experts have decided that Apple should have made its homework first. The firewall is not so well implemented and also some of the third party applications which are shipped with Leopard have not been updated to the latest available version.

Spyware horror is the marketing message released by PCLive.com for this year's Halloween and it consists in a video called "Fatal Error" which shows the catastrophic adventure of an evil home user computer which picks up viruses, keyloggers, spyware, pop-ups and other malware from Internet.