Future Technologies

It turns out Koobface is washed up – not raging. Last week, McAfee  released a threat report  showing samples of Koobface, the Facebook spreading worm, spiking in the Internet wild all through the first three months of 2013. But on Friday, the anti-virus giant that's now part of Intel did a complete reversal. In a  cryptically-worded blog post  , researcher Craig Schmugar notes that sample counts can be "influenced by repacking of the same underlying code . . . and other forms of server or client polymorphisms." Schmugar confesses that "these factors led to our Koobface statisitcs being off by a large margin." Facebook issued no public statement. But the company's PR agency contacted all the publications that ran with McAfee's initial, alarming, survey results. Cyberattacks are real and pose tangible risk to consumers and businesses. And public awareness is not what it should be. McAfee is not alone when it comes to competitive vendor...

Microsoft has orchestrated the bust-up of another top-tier botnet operation. These bad guys – operators of the sprawling Citadel botnet -- make the fictional band of sophisticated thieves from the movie Ocean's 11 look like amateurs. Authorities estimate they've scored more than $500 million from banks in the United States and abroad by accessing online accounts and rerouting funds. The software giant and the FBI, working with law enforcement and tech officials from some 80 countries, knocked out 1,000 of 1,400 of the Citadel botnets. A botnet is a collection of hundreds to thousands of infected PCs that respond to commands routed through a command-and-control server, which is also an infected PC. The bad guys running Citadel commanded as many as 5 million infected PCs, making Citadel one of the biggest botnet operations. Botnets are the engins that drive cybercrime. They fuel spam, denial of service attacks and cyberespionage. And they are used in big operations,...