Jaikumar Vijayan

IT staffers at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) are scrambling to keep up with a large increase in network traffic after the agency was asked by the U.S. Department of Justice to help locate and reunite missing victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Officials at Sunbelt Software Inc., a vendor of antispyware tools, said the company stumbled upon a massive ID theft ring that is using a well-known spyware program to break into and systematically steal confidential information from an unknown number of computers worldwide

The expanding investigation into this month's Zotob worm outbreak is uncovering evidence of the growing nexus between worm writers and gangs looking to profit from cybercrime, according to security experts.

The need to improve materials handling, inventory management and asset management processes is driving use of wireless technologies in the manufacturing sector. But cost and complexity are keeping the pace of adoption slow, experts say.

On Maine's Great Duck Island, scientists studying small sea birds called Leach's storm petrels are using a network of tiny wireless sensors embedded in the birds' nests to gather information. The sensors, or "motes," are used to monitor environmental conditions around the nesting burrows. One day, they could form the basis for intelligent wireless networks capable of harvesting a wide range of information from their surroundings. Applications could be as diverse as agricultural management, earthquake monitoring and military operations. Intel Research Berkeley is one of four university "lablets" that the chip maker set up to identify technologies worthy of "acceleration and amplification.

The growing popularity of Mozilla-based Web browsers appears to be attracting the attention of the malicious hacking community.

The growing popularity of Mozilla-based Web browsers appears to be attracting the attention of the malicious hacking community. Between July 1, 2004, and Dec. 31, 2004, the number of documented vulnerabilities affecting the Mozilla browser and The Mozilla Foundation's Firefox browser was higher than the number of vulnerabilities affecting Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer, according to the latest Internet Security Threat Report from Symantec Corp. released Monday.

Private messages exchanged using corporate BlackBerry wireless devices may not be quite so private after all. In fact, even the so-called PIN messages that many users thought were untraceable can be logged.