In what looks like another DNS hack, China’s biggest search engine “Baidu” has been hacked.. Users who visit the site were redirected to another political message.

In a way it’s a bit of a relief that the hackers didn’t use the opportunity to launch a massive phishing scam.. literally millions of people’s data would have been compromised if this was the case, making it one of the biggest hacks ever.

It’s not immediately clear how the “Cyber Army” (probably a fat guy in his mums basement) got access to the dns records, but I’m quite sure there are a few hundreds of people looking into it.

A new world record has been set where Pi (3.1415..) has been calculated to 2.7 Trillion digits. Whats perhaps more interesting is that it was completed by a simple desktop computer. This kind of thing is usually taken up by a supercomputer specially designed for crunching vast amounts of data.

If a simple desktop computer can work this out imagine how complex encryption need to be nowadays in order to keep one step ahead of would be attackers. With so much processing power at your disposal it’s becoming increasingly plausible for someone to crack higher levels of encryption.

Admittedly it was a pretty decent one with an i7 running at 2.93Ghz and 6GB of RAM. It also used up 1.5 Terabytes of data just on the number itself.

As you’ve probably seen in the news over the last week or so, tens of thousands of e-mail accounts have been compromised and had their log-in details posted online. Furthermore, the problem was not down to security weaknesses in Google Mail, Hotmail/Live Mail or Yahoo Mail. The problem was users giving out their information to anyone who asked.

You’re a web user. You do your shopping and banking online, always involving your confidential financial information. Perhaps you even pay the utility bills and taxes through online services. Chances are there is an awful lot of your information circulating on the internet.

So, if someone e-mailed you, claiming to be your bank, and asked for your bank account or credit card details, would you hand them over? Picture it this way – if the same person came up to you on the street and said that they were a representative of your bank, would you give the information to them, then and there? Probably not, if you had any sense!

While people may be more savvy about this threat, they seem not to be so sharp when it comes to ‘less important’ matters such as e-mail or social networking accounts. It seems tens of thousands of people have been more than happy to provide their usernames and passwords to anyone who asks, or to put those details into questionable forms on the web. When their data gets accessed, stolen or tampered with, they all of a sudden blame the services rather than themselves. This wouldn’t be so bad if every service didn’t say something like “Never give your information to anyone, ever – we will never ask for it” when you signed up!

What you have here is a deadly combination – stupid users and high tech con artists. Users are stupid in the way that they are wary in certain areas of the internet, but not in others – while they wouldn’t give a stranger their credit card details, they will give them their e-mail account details (which more often than not contains enough confidential information to sign up for a new credit card in your name!). Meanwhile, con artists are using ever more high tech methods to get people’s information – and succeeding.

Remember this golden rule: trust no-one. If someone is asking you about your information, chances are they aren’t supposed to have access to it. So, lesson to be learned? Don’t be a stupid user – get smart.

The US government has continued with its cyber-security initiative this year, with the main focus being what they term “cyber hygiene”. They want people to think more about the information they divulge over the internet and to be more wary of messages they receive via e-mail and social networking.

With the numbers of phishing attacks rising, organisers are keen to convince users that they should be suspicious of all messages from banks and other organisations, to ensure their personal data is not compromised. Of course, all banks and financial institutions already tell their customers to never divulge account information and that their staff will never ask for it, but it seems some people are still falling for some of the oldest online scams.

419 attacks, involving using someone’s identity to ask friends and acquaintances for money, are also on the rise. These attacks usually take place over social networks like Twitter and Facebook, but can also happen over instant messaging networks.

Security experts are also warning people to be ever-cautious of the information they divulge in the public domain, seeing as determined criminals can gather enough personal information over a wide spread of mediums to build up a convincing fake message with which to scam friends and relatives.

Let’s hope this initiative works out well and gives people enough information about how to avoid being scammed over the internet.

Microsoft is launching a new mobile phone software in October in a hope to revive its fortunes in the market for smart phones. It’s estimated that Microsoft’s Windows software is fourth in the market with a 9% share whilst rival Symbian has the majority at about 50%. It’s not yet known how many of the phones will feature Windows Mobile 6.5. Mobile operators which are signing on are AT&A and Verizon in the US, Orange and T-Mobile in Europe as well as a few others around the globe. Handsets making the phone include the likes of LG Electronics, Samsung and Sony Ericsson.

Rogueware refers to software that tries to advise users that their security or performance is underperforming and offers to rectify the problem. They employ this scare tactic in order to get people to part with their money to purchase licences for the Rogueware, hence why it is often also refered to as Scareware. Most of the time, scareware is useless and in actual fact can do more harm than good.

Recent Rogueware has been shown to try and uninstall well reputed brands of anti-virus, -malware or -adware software. This can have a disastrous effect as it then leaves the user believing they are protect and are free to perform their usual computer or internet activities, when in actual fact they are more at risk than ever before.

Ebay which is a popular online auction site has agreed to sell a large stake of its internet phone company Skype for approximately £1.2billion.

The majority of the company is owned by private investors including Netscape’s co – founder Marc Andreessen and private equity firms. Ebay will keep a 35% stake in the firm which has been on the market to sell for awhile now. The new owners are Andreessen Horowitx, Index Ventures who originally invested in Skype. Earlier this year Ebay had planned on selling its shares in 2010 which was the first indication that it was up for sale.

Approx 150million users were affected when the Gmail service run by Google was disrupted due a miscalculation by one of their engineers. Although it was for two hours it has been classed as a ‘big deal’ and investigations are underway to ensure it doesn’t happen again. The blackout occurred whilst carrying out routine upgrades to the company’s web server – outages have already taken place in February and March. It’s said that in this instance engineers slightly underestimated the increased load put on other parts of the system hence cause the widespread blackout. Access through desktop email programs seem to have been unaffected. Gmail itself has been ranked as the 3 most popular email program after services from Microsoft and Yahoo.

Users of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer are being urged to switch to a rival until serious security flaws have been fixed. This flaw could allow criminals to take control of people’s computer’s and steal their passwords. Microsoft themselves have warned people to become vigilant while it prepared an emergency patch to resolve it. Internet explorer is used by the vast majority of the world’s computer users. What makes it worse for Microsoft is that other rivals such as Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari have not been suspected of the flaw. It’s been advised that users change IE security setting to high, switch to a windows user account with limited rights and ensure you keep anti-virus and anti-spy ware software is up to date.

The gaming sector has shown a vast contrast in profitability between the western developers and the Chinese. It’s been identified that western gaming firms were still using traditional methods to get through to the retail channels via putting games onto DVDs. The Chinese developers have moved away from this and are now focusing on the PC market and use direct downloads rather than retail stores to get to consumers. Three factors which force the operating costs of western firms to spiral upwards include:

• Games are getting larger which mean longer development times hence more staff costs
• The console space is fragmented so developers have to work on many platforms at any one time.
• The cost of licensing intellectual property or gaining sports body endorsement has gone up.