Paul Roberts

We spend our days combing the ‘Net for interesting security happenings and also noting the great work that other reporters and researchers are doing on the security front. Usually that means traditional reporting work: pulling together information from a bunch of different sources, digging for information that hasn’t been made public and then synthesizing it to make sense of what’s going on.

It’s bound to happen: you create a cool, forward looking incentive program designed to tap the “wisdom of the crowd” and help make your products better, only to find out that, in fact, the “crowd” isn’t all that wise – and now wants you to pay cold, hard cash for their tepid ideas.

Some Apple Mac users who rushed to upgrade their systems with the company’s latest security patch were left to scramble for help after a conflict with disk encryption software from PGP rendered the upgraded Macs un-bootable. Reports of users who were unable to boot their Macs after upgrading their Mac OS X systems to the 10.6.5 version began appearing in PGP support forums on Wednesday.

How will you know when your dabbling in pharmaceutical spam and affiliate marketing hi jinks have truly poisoned your soul and stolen the last shreds of humanity you had left? Well, probably around the time that you find yourself taking advantage of public sentiment for the sacrifices of our men and women in uniform to push rogue antivirus malware and pornography.

Newly detected versions of the Lethic botnet are digitally signed using stolen credentials similar to those used by the Stuxnet worm, according to a blog post from Web security firm zScaler. 

In a blog post Wednesday, zScaler Senior Security Researcher Mike Geide said the company had intercepted new Lethic variants that were signed using legitimate digital signatures belonging to Taiwanese semiconductor firm Realtek Semiconductor Corp. That’s one of two firms whose credentials were used to help the Stuxnet worm fool detection systems and install itself on target systems.

The crackdowns on massive, spam-spewing botnets disrupted the global flow of spam e-mail…for about a month. That, according to a new report out from Kaspersky Lab. “Spam in the Third Quarter of 2010” is the latest, quarterly report from Kaspersky’s anti virus research labs. It finds that several coordinated take-downs of massive botnets in the second half of the year did put a dent in global spam volumes, but only temporarily.

The last two decades have been a cake walk for malware authors. More than nine-tenths of the world’s computers run some variation of the same operating system – Microsoft’s Windows.