Almost everyone with a computer (which is pretty much everyone now anyway) will have most likely encountered a computer virus or some sort of malicious software on their computer. While there is anti-virus and similar software to help prevent these infections or intrusions occuring, computer hackers and virus creators are constantly redesigning the worms and trojans to find a way around the prevantatives.

This is what led researchers to come up with a new form of protection, based on nature itself. The researchers noted that when an ant is under attack or in danger, “swarming intelligence” will kick in and pretty soon an abundance of ants will show up to overwhelm the threat. Using this same logic, the researchers have developed a form of computer security that involves sending out ‘digital ants’ that will crawl computer networks and once they spot a threat they call in for reinforcements until the danger is cleared.

A sophisticated computer trojan virus has been developed by computer hackers to steal the login credentials of hapless computer users when they visit major financial websites, such as banking and credit card systems.

The Clampi Virus can infect a computer when the user visits a website with malicious code on it, the virus will then lie in wait until the user logs on to any one of 4,500 financial websites. Once this happens the virus then grabs the login informatino, such as the password, and sends it back to the hackers.

The Clampi virus was originally discovered in 2005, but the latest strain that has been developed seems to be much more infectious for computers and is spreading at a rapid rate.

Security researchers from the Internet security firm, PandaLabs, recently discovered a number of scams involving a rising demand for hacks on soocial networking sites. One scamstood out  in particular, which offered to give gullible wannabe hackers access to any Facebook profile, all for a small cost of course.

The website only asks for the ID of the account you want to gain access to, it then scrapes information like the users name and other details in an attempt to appear more legit. Then all you have to do is sed some of your own private details, along with $100 to some place in Ukraine and you’ll be able to download the username and password to access the Facebook account. Simple, yes?

Don’t fall for these scams!

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.

In a classic example of how a computer system malfunction can have serious negative effects, the Police National Computer currently features a glitch that stops it from linking to the Northern Ireland criminal database. This means when routine checks are made, for example when someone is arrested and their name is put on the file, the computer is not finding their previous criminal profile if it was in Northern Ireland.

One such case is the Ulster terrorists, who are all on the Northern Ireland database, one of whom was apprehended recently, but they weren’t aware they had actually got Johnny Adair, nicknamed “mad dog”, until they went and Googled his name.

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.

A recent study undertaken by PC Tools showed that a large proportion of Briton’s are failing to update their secruity software at regular intervals. In fact, the results show that Britain is the worst of all the Western European countries when it comes to ensuring PC security is updated consistently.

Of the 4,500 participants surveyed, a third answered that they didn’t update their security software and almost one in ten didn’t have any security software in place at all.

Michael Greene, vice president of Product Strategy at PC Tools, stated;

“While consumers are generally security conscious, they are not yet security savvy. The increased use of the internet among consumers, almost all of whom are now online on a daily basis, is providing a lucrative market for cybercriminals and as a result, we are seeing more and more sophisticated techniques that lure consumers into clicking on malicious links or downloading malicious files, for example.”

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.