BitDefender Labs released  a warning today about a new threat called Trojan.Spammer.HotLan.A which uses Hotmail and Yahoo accounts to send e-mail spam.

The mystery surrounding the end to fictional British boy wizard Harry Potter's saga deepened today with a computer hacker posting what he said were key plot details -- but publishers warned the details could be fake.

The spammers behind last year’s destruction of Blue Security are back with a vengeance, using a variant of the ‘Storm Worm’ malware to launch a sustained distributed denial-of-service attack against three anti-spam services.

It happened already! A few days ago I was warning you to Never Share Confidential Data in P2P Networks ! An employee's illegitimate usage of P2P networks leaked personal information on more than 17,000 current and former workers at pharmaceutical giant Pfizer.

It appears that the root of all evil in TJ MAXX Marshalls security breach was the use of weak encryption (WEP) in  wireless access points. Despite a market capitalization of almost $13bn, the company apparently couldn't afford to secure its Wi-Fi network with anything more robust than the sadly inadequate Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) protocol. (The much more secure Wi-Fi Protected Access has become standard on most routers for four years now.)

A database containing the personal and financial details of almost 60 million students had constantly been accessed by some lending companies in a manner that violated federal privacy laws.

For the first time since unveiling the security breach more than two months ago, TJX put a number on how much card data was compromised : 45.7 milions - and it's a number TJX Cos. admits could go still higher.

A security breach in California set hundreds of thousands of Social Security Numbers online for 6 bucks a piece.
From what we know, these records have been available for sale on the World Wide Web since 2004, making this potentially the longest running government breach in California's history.

There are updates on tjmaxx and marshalls. TJX in the beginning supposed the intrusion began in May 2006 but the company said its ongoing investigation discovered the breach started nearly a year earlier, in July 2005.

Also, TJX declared that credit and debit card data had been accessed concerning transactions at U.S. and Puerto Rican stores from as far as January 2003 through June 2004, and credit card-only transactions at Canadian shops during the same period.

If you do live in a state where you can freeze your credit reports, I suggest that you do so. It's going to take some persistence — the three credit bureaus, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, don't exactly roll out the red carpet to help you put on a freeze. You'll need to contact every bureau separately, and must make a written request. The three credit bureaus can be reached at :