Two million U.S. PCs recruited to botnets

The United States leads the world in numbers of Windows PCs that are part of botnets, reveals a 240-page Microsoft report. More than 2.2 million U.S. PCs were found to be part of botnets in the first 6 months of 2010. Brazil had the second highest level of infections at 550,000. Infections were highest in South Korea where 14.6 out of every 1,000 machines were found to be enrolled in botnets. The report took an in-depth look at botnets which, said the head of security and identity at Microsoft U.K., now sit at the center of many cybercrime operations. A botnet called Lethic sent out 56 percent of all botnet spam sent between March and June even though it was only on 8.3 percent of all known botnet IP addresses. In the 3 months between April and June 2010, Microsoft cleaned up more than 6.5 million infections, which is twice as much as the same period in 2009. The statistics in the report were gathered from the 600 million machines that are enrolled in Microsoft’s various update services or use its Essentials and Defender security packages.

Details Here

first published week of:   10/18/2010

U.S. Cybersecurity Enhancement Act sails through House

The Cybersecurity Enhancement Act has been passed by the U.S. House of Representatives by a huge margin. The 422:5 vote was higher than expected, and should make it easier to pass through the Senate. The legislation calls for the National Science Foundation (NSF) to spend $396m over the next four years to fund cyber security research. The NSF will be awarded $94m to fund scholarships into security research, on the proviso that those who receive them work in the public sector for the same number of years as their studies. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, meanwhile, will develop a strategic plan for national security within a year, and build partnerships with the security industry. It will also set out technical security standards for the industry as a whole. Federal agencies spend $6bn annually on cyber security to protect a $72bn IT infrastructure, according to the Office of Management and Budget. The Federal government funds $356m in cyber security research each year. “Critical infrastructures ranging from electrical grids, to oil production facilities to telecoms and transportation networks are under constant attack from cyber criminals,3 said the chief technical officer at McAfee.

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first published week of:   02/15/2010

US broadband's average speed: 3.9Mbps

In what has become a familiar refrain, the latest State of the Internet report from Akamai shows the US trailing in a number of metrics, including average connection speeds and broadband penetration.

As the FCC is set to announce the first official national broadband policy in March, the study underscores the need for that policy to encourage expansion of high-speed networking infrastructure (which it appears poised to do) as well as drive the necessary competition to make broadband connections more affordable (which it won't apparently address in much detail).

Akamai bases its statistics on data gathered from its network of 56,000 servers spread around the world, part of its optimized media delivery system. This gives Akamai an extremely large data set to mine for information like the number of unique IP addresses accessing its services and their connection speeds. Sifting through this data and linking IP addresses to specific locations allows for some fairly detailed analysis.

Details Here

first published week of:   01/18/2010

US government probing Google Street View after all

The Federal Communications Commission has confirmed that it has launched a probe into Google’s Street View application.

“Last month, Google disclosed that its Street View cars collected passwords, e-mails and other personal information wirelessly from unsuspecting people across the country,” said FCC Enforcement Bureau Chief Michele Ellison, in a statement sent to Ars. “In light of their public disclosure, we can now confirm that the Enforcement Bureau is looking into whether these actions violate the Communications Act.”

Google Street View is the last zoom layer on Google Maps—up-close and personal visual data collected via cameras and WiFi systems attached to roving Street View-mobiles. The feature’s information collecting shenanigans have been controversial not only in the United States, but in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Germany, France, and Spain.

Details Here

first published week of:   11/08/2010

Video Games: Your Brain could be making you lose

I [author Matt Ford] am on the old side of the generation that grew up with video games as a ubiquitous presence in their life. I clearly recall the world's worst Atari port of one of the greatest game of all time—PacMan—and I even remember playing what is widely considered to be the worst game of all time, the Atari 2600's E.T. (I still clearly recall how hard it was). Today, video games focus less on forcing you to pump more and more quarters into an arcade machine punishing difficulty and more on telling a story and making the experience a bit gentler on the novice gamer.

Prior cognitive, psychological, and neurological studies have shown that expert video game players are capable of outperforming novices in measures of attention and perception. They also have demonstrated that, when novices train on video games for 20-plus hours, they experienced no measurable increase in cognitive ability. These two pieces of information would seem to point to an innate difference between expert and novices gamers, instead of suggesting that gaming is a skill that can be learned.

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first published week of:   01/25/2010

Virtual desktop trials soar as technology improves

Industry pundits said 2010 would be the year of the virtual desktop proof-of-concept trial, and so far, the vision looks to be coming true in a big way.

With desktops a commodity and IT shops under pressure to economize, enterprises have picked spots to test virtual desktops. Many have also considered remaking their corporate infrastructures to accommodate the high-bandwidth requirements of some applications running on thin clients, and they have begun to look into hosted desktops

One catalyst of this is the migration to Windows 7, for which IT shops have weighed the value of hosting versus that of keeping physical PCs on the premises. Better products on the market have also spurred virtual desktop trials.

“The level of interest is nothing short of amazing,” said Mark Margevicius, a research director at consulting firm Gartner Inc. “Even if only a small percentage [of enterprises virtualize their desktops], the market is huge. PCs are everywhere.”"

Details Here

first published week of:   02/22/2010

Volume 31

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