Gian Fulgoni, ComScore chairman and co-founder, felt necessary to straighter the fact that the term "researchware", on one hand, and 'adware,' 'spyware,' and 'malware', on the other hand, must not be confused. The distinction is that while the first is used by the market researchers, the second ones are used by the criminal researchers.

According to StopBadware.org, the latest version of RealPlayer is tricking the users installing, once with it, the Rhapsody Player Engine required to access RealNetwork's online music service. The problem appears when Rhapsody Player Engine can’t be removed, even if you uninstall the RealPlayer.

As SCMagazine informs us, a new threat has emerged in the spam world. Apparently, it’s dressed up like a new botnet spamming male sexual enhancement pill advertisings and has already managed to surpass the infamous Storm worm botnet which had been considered so far the ‘largest single source of the world’s spam’.

New face in town: the Beselo worm. It targets Nokia smartphones. The security firms, among which SMobile Systems, are worried and are trying to develop a disinfection device.On its blog, F-Secure, an anti-virus supplier, posted a warning concerning the virus. Smartphones running the Symbian S60 Second Edition operating system are the affected one.

It looks like the Storm worm has been a great success. This is the official opinion of the 2007 Global Threat Report from  security firm ESET.The social engineering tactics used over the past 12 months and the duration of the methods represented the concern of the report.

US-CERT has received reports of new Storm Worm activity circulating. The emails contain romantic or Valentine's Day greetings and provide links for users to click on. The links are in the form of actual IP addresses, such as http:/x.x.x.x, although actual domain names may also be used. If a user clicks on the link provided, they will be directed to a malicious website that will attempt to exploit a variety of vulnerabilities and install malware onto the user's system.

Important information came from London: the internet users are advised to watch out for Mebroot - a sneaky Windows virus that is capable to steal, for online bank accounts, login details.The period between 12 December and 7 January was ill-fated, especially for those in Europe: almost 5,000 computers were infected by the nasty program.

Bzub is an extremely versatile spyware created to steal banking information.It seems that it originated in Mother Russia to be rapidly spread afterwards all over the world hence gaining various applications. It targets those using Windows XP, 2000, 2003.

After hearing about the association between the "Secret Crush" application and an important spyware producer, Facebook disqualified it.

According to official information, the separation is definite: "Facebook is committed to user safety and security and, to that end, its Terms of Service for developers explicitly state that applications should not use adware and spyware". They also declared that the Facebook Platform Terms of Service had been breached so they stopped the Secret Crush application.

As PCWorld stated, Prevx malware researchers have drawn attention to the dramatic increase in the number of PCs harboring rootkit infections.

During a two-month period research, the Prevx CSI malware scanner was used to scan over 725,000 PCs. One in six PCs scanned within October 2007 was infected with some form of spyware or malware .