A botnet responsible for a significant amount of spam has been crippled but may reconstitute itself in a matter of weeks, according to vendor M86 Security.

The Pushdo or Cutwail network of hacked computers ranked in the top five or so botnets for spam, responsible for as much as 10 percent of all spam, said Ed Rowley, product manager for M86 Security. The spam often advertises fake software, so-called designer goods and questionable pharmaceutical products.

But security analysts with the computer security company LastLine took action last week, contacting ISPs that were hosting the command-and-control infrastructure for the botnet. About 30 servers at eight hosting providers were found to be supporting Pushdo. LastLine contacted the ISPs, and about 20 of the servers were taken offline, according to itsblog. Some ISPs, however, were unresponsive.

Full Story: Computer World

Price: $.99, Version: 1.0 (iTunes)

Description:

POCHI IN SPACE is one of the most addictive and engaging dodging games ever to hit the App Store!

Strap on a jetpack and join our hero Pochi, the lovable green alien explorer, as he makes his way across a universe filled with danger at every turn.

In Exploration Mode, see how long you can keep Pochi alive by dodging meteors, UFOs, and space debris while racking up bonus points and unlocking rewards. In a jam? Deploy shields to deflect incoming dangers! Want to cruise in style? Hop into a spaceship and blast anything in your path!

If you’re feeling the need for speed, you can also test your speed skills in Race Mode, as you help Pochi zip toward the finish line in a crazy timed obstacle course unlike any you’ve ever seen!

What’s included:
- 2 addicting gameplay modes
- Dozens of dangers to dodge
- Vibrant hand-drawn art and beautiful backgrounds
- 5 unlockable outfits, 3 unlockable themes, and more to come!
- A cool and catchy soundtrack paired with awesome sound effects
- OpenFeint worldwide leaderboards – launch yourself to the top!
- Plenty of achievements to rack up those Feint Points
- Share your scores on Facebook and Twitter!

Description: This is a classic code-breaking game as the MasterMind board game. The aim is to break a code of many colors. The difficulty is fully adjustable. This lite version is supported by AdMob.

V 1.6.0 :
- Android 1.6 for 320×480 screen ONLY

Note: this game replace the old one called “MasterMind”

Cost: Free

Market Link: market://search?q=pname:kgame.callofcode

Analysts suggest the search giant is seeking a share of the social-networking growth its rival enjoys, writes Sonja Ryst.

The tweet sent a quiver through the blogosphere: “Google to launch Facebook competitor very soon.” That line, from Kevin Rose, the entrepreneur who founded content-sharing site Digg, unleashed a sense that the online world as we know it was about to change fundamentally.

The idea that Google, the world’s dominant search company, would soon take on Facebook, the world’s dominant social-networking site, intrigued business analysts and bloggers alike. They set out to guess what the service, reportedly called “Google Me”, would be like. They predict Google’s efforts could yield a “Facebook killer”. Google has confirmed so little about its strategy, it’s unclear how or what results it might bring. But the speculation has been rampant.

Full Story: The Age (Australia)

Apple’s failure to clean up old code in QuickTime leaves people running Internet Explorer (IE) vulnerable to drive-by attacks, a Spanish security researcher said today.

Ruben Santamarta, a researcher at Madrid-based Wintercore who revealed a bug in IE8 last month, today outlined the QuickTime plug-in vulnerability. Hackers only need to dupe users into visiting a malicious site hosting exploit code, said Santamarta, who added that his attack code works when someone browses with IE on a machine running Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 that has QuickTime 7.x or the older QuickTime 6.x installed.

Santamarta’s exploit works because Apple didn’t tidy up QuickTime’s code after developers dropped the “_Marshaled_pUnk” function.

Full Story: Network World

“We are alerting all government agencies to review and improve security of their websites in view of the hacking of the website this afternoon,” presidential spokesman Herminio Coloma said.

“We are adopting best practices to lessen the vulnerability of our websites to hacking and other cyber crimes,” Coloma said.

The information agency website was inaccessible for several hours in the afternoon with the words “Hacked by 7z1″ appearing if searched on Google.

Coloma did not say whether the hacker attack was related to widespread public anger in Hong Kong over police bungling of a hostage crisis that left eight tourists dead on Monday.

Full Story: Yahoo PH

As Chikka celebrates its 10th year anniversary, Chief Imagination Officer  Dennis Mendiola  remembers the time when Chikka was just an idea  to improve customer service for the online community when he and his business partners were running a small e-commerce business.

As with all great innovations, it was this idea that eventually paved the way for the development of an Internet-based PC-to-mobile instant messaging application that the Filipino community has learned to embrace and value.

“Over the years, we’ve been getting emails from Chikka users around the world, telling us how much Chikka means to them,” CIO Dennis Mendiola said. “We provide an easy and cost-efficient way for Filipinos all over the world to communicate, and we’re working hard to develop new services and applications that would address their communication needs better. What makes us unique is that we provide universal access to Filipinos worldwide so they can stay in touch on any communications platform at affordable rates.”

Full Story: Chikka

Price: $.99, Version: 1.0 (iTunes)

Description:

Fracture allows you to paint cubist style portraits using your own photos. Aesthetics employed by abstract masters such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque have been studied and recreated in this fun creative app.

Simply use your camera or search your image gallery for 1 or more photos, adjust the settings to your specification and you are ready to start painting. The following features are available:

- Multitouch
- Accelerometer – Shake to clear
- Save your painting to your image gallery

Send your best paintings to apps@augmatic.co.uk to be featured in Flickr gallery.

Head over to http://vimeo.com/jamesalliban/videos To see footage of the app in use.

Built using openFrameworks.

Description: PS: the revised ad has been significantly reduced.

This is a very traditional Rubik’s Cube game, you can choose to accept the cube quantities Raiders.

Cost: Free

Developer Site: http://blog.csdn.net/cping1982

Market Link: market://search?q=pname:com.loon.cube

Hard on the heels of a report that a USB drive was used to compromise US military networks in 2008, a security company today claimed that 25% of all new worms are designed to spread through the portable storage devices.

“Much of the malware in circulation has been designed to distribute through these devices,” said Luis Corrons, the technical director of PandaLabs, the research arm of Panda Security, in a statement yesterday. “Not only does it copy itself to these gadgets, but it also runs automatically when a USB device is connected to a computer, infecting the system practically transparently to the user.”

While a quarter of all 2010′s worms rely on USB devices to spread to other PCs, a recent Panda survey of more than 10,000 small- and medium-sized firms found that 27% of those victimised by a malware infection in the last year reported that the attack had originated with infected USB hardware, primarily flash drives.

Full Story: PC World (NZ)

The open-plan office in which I’m standing is buzzing, because a new type of threat has emerged in the past 24 hours. Excited young men and women (though mostly men) chatter beneath wall-mounted TV screens showing maps of the world overlaid with pulsing dots and scrolling information – the world’s major cyber-security threats in real time.

I’m in a humdrum business park a mile or two outside Dublin city centre (not the first place you would think of when visualising cyber-crime detectives playing hi-tech cat and mouse games with criminal masterminds) to meet Patrick Fitzgerald and the team at computer security experts Symantec.

Dublin’s own Silicon Valley has long been home to the likes of AOL, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and IBM. Symantec fits in nicely as the parent company of software protection specialist Norton.

Full Story: The Guardian (UK)

The Frugalware Developer Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Frugalware 1.3, our thirteenth stable release.
No new features have been added since 1.3rc2, but 94 changes have been made to fix minor bugs. If you didn’t follow the changes during the pre/rc releases, here are the most important changes since 1.1 in no particular order:

• * Updated packages: Linux kernel 2.6.35, Xorg server 1.8, GNOME 2.30, KDE 4.4.5 to name a few major components.
• * For the first time in the history of Frugalware Linux, we’re offering an official graphical netinstall image, search for the “-gui” suffix on the ftp mirrors.
• * This time we’ve verified that no workaround is needed to install this release in VMware and because of this, the relevant note is removed from the documentation.
• * The monolithic configuration of XOrg is now split to the xorg.conf.d directory. You can still use the monolithic config, but the config files in the new directory have priority. XOrg now also uses udev to detect your hardware automatically, /etc/X11/xorg.conf is no longer generated by default.
• * Updated image libraries: libjpeg 8 and libpng 1.4. While adding support for these new libraries, we touched 1500+ packages, doing various minor fixes and improvements here and there.

Please refer to the Frugalware Haven ChangeLog for more information.
Download for i686, x86_64 and ppc: See our mirror list. Don’t forget to check the integrity of the install images before burning!

Full Story: Frugal

Price: $.99, Version: 3.1.2 (iTunes)

Description:

Game features
- iPhone Only(iOS 3.0 or later)
- Casual Character Images
- Fire artilleries to attack by using multi-touch
- Attack by using gravitational sensor such as guided missiles
- Ability is upgraded by using achieved golds
(Status – Str, Dex, Con)
- Items are supplied to recover strength during the play
- Classified stages with their own concept
(River, City, Forest, Snow fields, Desert)
(River stage is only available now, but others will be available later)
- Open Feint Support

Updated v.3.1.2
- River Stage 2, 3, 4 modifications of the position of the enemy reconnaissance tank
- The repair potion system will be changed to drop when kill the enemy
- If you want to play the normal mode, you must clear all easy mode