We might joke about the "Great Firewall of China", but by the end of 2007 content blocking will be a fact of Internet life in the UK.

In two recent studies of anti-phishing tools, one (sponsored by Microsoft) rated Internet Explorer highest, whilst the second (carried out for Mozilla) put the latest version of FireFox at the top of the list. Now a third, completely independent study has said that all phishing filters miss considerable numbers of suspect sites, are short on usability and suffer false positives.

Grisoft's release of two new versions of its AVG security tools for open source operating systems Linux and FreeBSD recommend that there's nowhere secure to hide from computer viruses anymore.

Some financial institutions last week canceled thousands of credit and debit cards in Michigan due to fraud alarms related to an possible data compromise at a convenience store chain, stressing the wide effect that retail security breaches can have.

IBM declared it has joined with BitDefender to include that company's antivirus and antispyware technologies into its Internet Security Systems division's endpoint security products.

McAfee's Avert Labs has exposed a new virus in the wild, W32/Realor.worm that modifies all of the Real Media files it comes across.

Geok Meng Ong talked about quite a few worms targeting media players on the most recent post to McAfee's Avert Labs blog. One was prominent for its behavior - W32/Realor.worm, a virus that brings delivers web pages to a Real Player user.

According to studies commissioned by the Mozilla Foundation, its own Firefox browser is more efficient in blocking out phishing attacks than Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
Both Mozilla and Microsoft have released new versions of their browser software - Firefox 2.0 and IE7 correspondingly - and both vendors were eager to emphasise new anti-phishing features that had been included.

A firewall system for mobile phones has been launched by anti-virus company F-Secure. The system, called F-Secure Mobile Security is for devices based on Symbian S60 3rd Edition and Symbian OS v9.

Red Hat has declared the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Beta 2. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, to be released in early 2007, will offer open source technologies designed to improve performance, security and flexibility. With a sustained focus on technology intended to drive costs out of deploying and managing infrastructure software, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 will deliver complete integration for commercial-strength Linux virtualization in an x86 server environment.

ERG Ventures LLC is charged of spreading spyware and adware on the Internet using the infamous Media Motor program.

A federal court has shut down a Nevada business " ERG Ventures LLC -- that the Federal Trade Commission accused of spreading spyware and adware on the Internet using the notorious Media Motor program.