When a small padlock appears in the corner of your Web browser's address bar or the entire bar turns green, it seems like a powerful signal you're safe to proceed.

More than 3 million Web pages on the Internet are malicious. According to Neils Provos, senior staff software engineer with Google, the percent is one in 1,000.The experts call these attacks "drive-by downloads". Their number increased although through firewalls and better security practices, Microsoft succeeded in stopping the viruses or worms to directly attack PCs.

IBM released the findings of the 2007 X-Force Security report, detailing a disturbing rise in the sophistication of attacks by criminals on Web browsers worldwide. According to IBM, by attacking the browsers of computer users, cybercriminals are now stealing the identities and controlling the computers of consumers at a rate never before seen on the Internet.

A new project, Symantec Family Safety Initiative, was presented at the DEMO Conference, held in Palm Desert, Arizona. Symantec imagined a method to protect kids online: instead of offering ways to block certain Web sites or limiting access to pre-screened safe sites, it helps them in their regulation.

According to Sourcewire, ScanSafe, the global provider of Web Security-as-a-Service, has made public the availability of Anywhere+ which can be considered the first application in the world ever to function software -as-a-service (SaaS) Web security delivering real-time security against malware and enforcement of adequate Internet usage policies for all users surfing the Web no matter what their location is.

What is CAPTCHA? CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart and it is a system employed by Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and others, designed prevent automated systems that attempt to register web-based email accounts, or to dump spam and guessing passwords on blog comments sections.

A mysterious virus has been attacking hundred of sites, most UK-based. Among them, Directline-holidays, a company for the customers with a small budget but eager to have a vacation.The computers of the people using the site are infected with a Trojan which extracts information and uses for its purpose.

Specifically, the Websense Security Labs expects: the Olympics will spur a flurry of hacker activity such as compromises of popular Olympic news or other sports sites; hackers will leverage the increased adoption of Macs and iPhones as new means for cross-platform Web attacks; special interest groups that fall within a certain age group, wealth bracket, or people with particular purchasing habits, will become targets of Web 2.0 attacks; and spam will increase in the blogosphere and “talk back” sections of news sites to drive traffic and increase search engine rankings of infected Web sites.

Shopping online can be very relieving, cheaper and time-saving as long as it is done safely but it can just as well become quite risky.There are, however, a few tips that the Federal Trade Commission, according to North Jersey magazine, has offered to those engaging online shopping.

According to security experts who have been tracking the sudden surge of badvertising, which was still ongoing as of Nov. 14, ads from an RBN front company called AdTraff and other RBN front organizations are using JavaScript and Flash in ingenious new ways, inserting SWF (Shockwave Flash Object) files into Flash animations that then spawn entirely different—and thoroughly malicious—ads than depicted in the submitted Flash file.