Top 5 Optimizers technical rumors

Facebook’s 400 million users have been targeted by a spam run that could infect their computers with malicious software designed to steals passwords and other data. Over the last two days, millions of messages have been sent. The messages appear to come from Facebook, with a return address that looks legitimate but has been spoofed, such as “help@facebook.com”. The messages say that the user’s Facebook password has been reset and the user should download an attachment that contains the new password. The English-language messages are grammatically correct, but contain an odd sign-off: “Thanks, Your Facebook.” The attachment is actually a Trojan horse program, which infects a computer without any visible signs, the spam run contained a variety of malware programs, including password stealers, rogue antivirus programs or botnet code.

North Korea has reportedly developed its own version of the Linux operating with a graphical user interface that closely resembles Microsoft Windows. Although the operating system is still considered stable, it was easy to set up, taking around 15 minutes to install, however it comes with a single language option: Korean. The desktop interface shown in the screenshots closely resembles Windows, and appears to be based on a recent version of the K Desktop Environment (KDE). The Red Star browser, which Mikhail said was called My Country, is based on Mozilla’s Firefox browser, and allows users to access North Korea’s closed network , called My Country BBS. Other features of Red Star include a word processor, an e-mail client, antivirus software, multimedia players for audio and video, as well as several games.

Symantec Corp.  released the findings of its global 2010 State of Enterprise Security study. The study found that 42 percent of organizations rate security their top issue. This isn’t a surprise, considering that 75 percent of organizations experienced cyber attacks in the past 12 months. These attacks cost enterprise businesses an average of $2 million per year. Finally, organizations reported that enterprise security is becoming more difficult due to understaffing, new IT initiatives that intensify security issues and IT compliance issues. The study is based on surveys of 2,100 enterprise CIOs, CISOs and IT managers from 27 countries in January 2010.

Trying to get rid of the adult content that could be easily accessed by children, Apple decided to remove more then five thousand adult applications from App Store, that contained either sexual context words in their names, or photos of men and women naked or wearing bikinis. Apple will also pay more attention to the new application that will be promoted for App Store sales.

Based on a survey of 50,000 people, new Census Bureau data shows that the poor, the elderly and minorities continue to lag behind other groups. About 64 per cent of households have an Internet connection, which is more than the 51 per cent that did in 2007. Those who didn’t have access either claimed it wasn’t needed or was too expensive. Some Americans insisted that they were still trying to adopt the wheel, while others said that using fire was proving trickier than they had thought and a small minority were still having difficulty with using opposable thumbs. Only 11 per cent of people said the reason they didn’t use the Internet was because they lived in a rural area where banjo picking interfered with broadband signals.

After the last week security update from Microsoft, their support service has been flooded with reports from customers, saying that their computers had been rendered unusable with a blue-screen-of-death. After the investigation, Microsoft has come to the conclusion that this might be caused be the malicious software, and claims to have proof that removing malware will allow the system to boot. Confirming this an unrelated Windows XP user has traced the problem to the atapi .sys file, which turned to have a TDSS rootkit in it. Stand-alone tools to remove the rootkit can now be found over the Internet, but to do so, you will still have to remove your hard-drive and scan it using another computer.

26 vulnerabilities in 13 security bulletins have been fixed with the recent big patch by Microsoft. 11 of these bulletins effected Windows, and the rest affected the older versions of Microsoft Office. Although the server-side vulnerabilities become less and less common, they may become a golden goose for an attacker if discovered, as it may allow full access to the computer or the entire network without any user involvement required. It is highly advised to get the updates as soon as possible for your own safety.

Google suspects that the recent attacks on the company’s networks might have been done with the help of the company’s employees. The search giant isn’t just negotiating this matter with Chiniese government, but also is investigating the matter theiself. We remind you that Google has decided to leave one of the biggest parts of the internet market because of the “sophisticated” attack whitch led to the loss of the intelectual property of a number of companies, including Adobe, Juniper Network, Symantec, Rackspace Hosting and by some uncomfirmed data – Yahoo.

Companies higher ups have decided to review theire policies in China. As known since 2006 Google has launched it’s Chiniese version Google.cn to match the countries Internet laws, and it was decided that if in the current sircumstances it will be impossible to provide the population of China with open Internet and open information the work in PRC will be reviewed. And this is what actually happened. Google claims that in mid december there have been a lot of cyber-attacks from China, aiming to steal intelectual property of the Company. Mostly these attacks were aimed at getting access to Gmail accounts of chiniese activists and people bringing up the people rights question in China as well as people from other countries with the same tahoughts. With this the search giant announced that it’s work in PRC will be reviewed, as it no longer is going to keep censore on their search engine in China. In the next few weeks they will be discussing how may Google work without results filtering with the government of China, if it will tend to be impossible , the Google.cn will be shut down, as well as probably Google offices in China.

According to Netcraft company, whose main activity is global network monitoring, the number of websites in Internet is now apporaching 234 million. Only in last year 47 million of new websites have emerged, and 7 million of them are active – meaning they have regular visitors. The leader in web-servers among all of these websites is still Apache web-server, which is used in 109 million websites.