By sending phishing emails, the Storm Worm botnet lure people to false banking sites, hosted and controlled by it. That’s why F-Secure and Trend Micro suddenly became interested in. The main issue is represented by the fact that the zombie computer army from 2007 is now separated into many groups, increasing the difficulty to defeat it. These weren’t the expectations for 2008.

Facebook is currently dealing with phishing scam attacks which gather users' login information and passwords. Reportedly, enticing comments tricked some users a few days ago into accessing what seemed to be a valid Facebook link. The page to which the link directs although logs the victims into Facebook it also crops personal data of the user.

The government will offer debit cards instead of paper checks to all Social Security recipients who agree to this new payment method. This will drastically reduce the risk of theft.  

Treasury officials are confident that the new "Direct Express" will ease the life of the Social Security recipients by making grocery esier and avoiding rip-offs.

It's aimed at the 3.9 million people who get the benefits but don't have bank accounts, costing more than $44 million annually in paper checks, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.

GFI Software announced the release of the latest version of GFI EndPointSecurity, a solution that helps to control the use of portable storage devices – such as iPods, flash drives, USB sticks and PDAs – on the network and prevent the leakage or theft of sensitive data. The latest version of GFI EndPointSecurity comes with advanced access control functionality and a whitelist/blacklist feature to limit usage of portable devices to those only approved by the company.

Although identity theft tends to raise more and more awareness lately, the information that circles around the subject is hardly sufficient. It seems that the period with the greatest occurrence of such crimes is during holidays when usually people forget about protective measures and become very negligent.

Identity theft just got a new attack venue by stealing somebody's medical records in order to fool the insurance companies and gain some money. Pulling this scam out without getting busted immediately is accomplished by piecing together a synthetic identity from broken pieces of other persons' identities.

The popular social networking site MySpace has been invaded by a phishing scam which makes use of fake Macy’s gift card in order to steal user’s private data.

The "phishing" scam reportedly is targeting the site's younger users, appearing as an email from a friend and prompting them to click on a link to retrieve a $500 Macy's gift certificate.

CRM software vendor Salesforce.com has sent a letter to its customers, warning that they may be the targets of malicious software or phishing scams, after one of its employees received a phishing e-mail message and was tricked into divulging a corporate password.

The FTC created in  2003 a "do not call" registry (which, since, has gain tremendous popularity by preventing telemarketing phone calls) in order to limit the hours that unsolicited telephone calls may be made to consumers and it helped enormously.

Nowadays, the Federal Trade Commission faced a new ‘request’ as it has been asked by nine privacy and consumer organizations to come up with a "do not track" list for internet users who want their online activities not to be tracked, stored and used in advertising purposes.

In the near future we may use pictures and drawings  in order to authenticate ourselves in different password protected areas.  Computer scientists from Newcastle University have developed software that lets the user draw pictures as an alternative to remembering strings of letters and numbers.