The Federal Trade Commission’s name is being used these days by a bogus email scheme designed to trick users into visiting an infected website. The email references a complaint filed with the FTC against the recipient and the email attachment tries to download a virus. The FTC warns users not to clink on links within the email and not to open any attachments.

Chinese National Day weekend holiday has been used by malicious hackers to infect more than 1 million computers says Jiangmin Co, a leading Chinese anti-virus company.

Oct. 6 was the scene of more than 118,000 crashed computers as detected by the company’s monitoring systems. "Viruses have been extremely active during the long vacation because more people chose to stay at home and surf the Internet, shopping online or playing online games," He Gongdao, an anti-virus expert at Jiangmin, said on Monday.

Li Jun, the man behind the "panda" virus that infected numerous computers earlier this year, was sentenced to four years in prison by the People's Court in Xiantao, Hubei Province, China.

The culprit was not alone in his cyber act of destruction and three of his collaborators all aged in their twenties, were given sentences of between one and two-and-a-half years.

The insider threat has become the most reported security incident in 2007 as stated by the respected U.S. Computer Security Institute (CSI).

Almost 500 top security personnel from US corporations and government agencies took part in the survey and 59 percent of them cited insider incidents to be more of a security concern as opposed to virus and spyware which was chosen by 52 percent.

AOL introduced the new AOL Internet Security Central (http://safety.aol.com), offering a comprehensive suite of free safety and security tools designed to ensure a safer and more secure online experience, and provide overall PC protection. Included in the offering is the new McAfee® VirusScan® Plus -- Special edition from AOL, offering essential protection against viruses, spyware and intruders at no charge through AOL.com.

In a recent court case that was decided earlier this month, the police had used a keystroke logger to record the typing of a suspected ecstasy manufacturer who has been using encryption to thwart the police.

Panda Software has launched a new free online antivirus scan which can find more than one million spyware and viruses on your PC in record breaking time : less than a minute !

The Warezov and Zhelatin worm families are among the victims in this latest struggle between viruses. Warezov.ms, which came second in the April Top Twenty, has fallen off the bottom of the table, and Warezov.ns, which came to take its place, wasn't able to rise higher than the very modest 19th place.

This test report is the second part of the February 2007 test run by AV-Comparatives. The same products were used and the results show the pure proactive detection capabilities that the products had three months ago. Interesting findings.

PC Tools Spyware Doctor Starter Edition is the new member of the Google Pack, a collection of free software available for any user of Windows-based PCs. The reorganized software kit now offers new security options and a fresh way to display photos.