Paul Roberts

As director of research at the SANS Institute, Alan Paller has a unique window from which to view the U.S. government's efforts to secure its vast computer networks.

Antivirus companies and the SANS Internet Storm Center (ISC) issued a warning Friday about sophisticated e-mail attacks that are using a previously unknown hole in Microsoft Word to infiltrate corporate networks.

Jeanson James Ancheta, who used a network of zombie computers to rake in tens of thousands of dollars and buy himself a BMW, was sentenced to almost five years in federal prison. The sentence is one of the longest ever given for spreading computer viruses. Ancheta, who is 20, controlled a network of more than 400,000 zombie computers or "bots." He built and controlled the network using a unique variant of the Trojan horse program called "rxbot."

A popular Venezuelan hacker known as "RaFa" was arrested April 2 and charged with hacking into U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) servers almost four years ago.

An internal investigation at the LexisNexis division of Reed Elsevier PLC has uncovered evidence that as many as 310,000 more people may have had their personal information exposed to unauthorized individuals who compromised the security of a massive database of public and private information, including Social Security and drivers license numbers.

Leading global telecommunications companies, ISPs and network operators will begin sharing information on Internet attacks as members of a new group called the

New technology from IBM Corp. is designed to stop spam by identifying the Internet domain it came from, and can help spot online scams such as phishing attacks and e-mail spoofing. The company Tuesday announced the release of FairUCE, or "Fair use of Unsolicited Commercial Email" for the company's alphaWorks advanced technology program, citing a newly released IBM survey that found spam is 76 per cent of all e-mail and may cost U.S. companies US$17 billion to fight this year.

They're stealthy and deceptive...and could fuel the next big wave of malicious code. They are "rootkits" -- so dubbed because of their ability to replace and impersonate core operating system functionality with something that seems the same but provides remote attackers with a back door into compromised systems. Experts say "rootkits" could fuel the next big wave of malicious code, and are already beginning to influence the design of new Internet worms and viruses. As Paul Roberts reports, the good news is security software companies are sitting up and taking notice, releasing software that can spot and remove rootkits from infected systems.