Redmond man unmasked: UK.gov open standards stalled

Some things never change! The Register reports the UK government has had to delay closure of talks on open standards in public sector IT following what it called a "conflict of interest" involving a Microsoft consultant. It is Microsoft trying to influence decisions about open standards like they did with the OOXML standard. Open standards are of course not Microsofts interests because it gives everybody else the opportunity to make a alternative Office package with 100% compatibility.

Hackers now pick tools from script kiddies' toybox – report

The Register reports from Infosec 2012. Research show that hacking tools formerly used by scriptkiddies only are now used by experienced hackers too. Main reason seems to be that quality of those tools have become really good (enough) now. Disturbing point in this news is that automated defenses against this tools are not there yet or are not used to their full capacity.

Flashback infections not waning after all; 650,000 Macs still hijacked

Ars Technica reports that numbers of Flashback infected Macs are still above the 600,000. Citing Kasperski Labs which explains why numbers earlier this week by other anti-virus firms were wrong. A large number of the infected machines are not able to reach their C&C servers but they are still infected. Of course fanbois blame everybody but Apple. Which will not help to raise the notion that looking at the rising number of Apple Macs they have become an attractive target for crooks and criminals.

When the cops subpoena your Facebook information, here's what Facebook sends the cops

The Phoenix Boston blog does give a interesting insigth of what information Facebook stores and make available to the cops when asked. Besides the obvious account information as date of birth, address etc. they also give a list of friends, used ip-addresses, logs etc. The information in the Phoenix files goes back to 2009 and at that date they apparently already stored tagged photos on other accounts which identifies the suspect in this case. If you ever wondered what privacy remains on Facebook the answer is nothing you, your family your friends or foes ever posted on Facebook.
It also reminds me why I do not have a Facebook account.

550,000-strong army of Mac zombies spreads across world

The Register reports about a special created Mac trojan botnet. Although not infected at large as Windows computers Apple is apparently reaching a critical mass which appears to be attractive to malware writers. Apple has not been very fast with closing the critical bug in Java which made this exploit possible and they should learn a few things by now.