Devnet Cloud View & Web Industry News

Forrester Research
The question for the US tech market is no longer whether the US economy is in recession — instead, it is how long and deep the recession will be and how much damage will it do to the tech sector. Forrester is still a relative optimist, believing that the recession will last into mid-2009, [...]

WashingtonPost
In the fallout resulting from knocking McColo Corp. offline, this past week may prove to be a missed opportunity in the prevention of a dramatic reappearance of junk e-mail, as a botnet that once controlled 40 percent of the world’s spam apparently has found a new home.
The botnet Srizbi was knocked offline Nov. 11 along [...]

VNUnet.com
Internet users are getting better at protecting themselves, but are still not doing enough to keep PCs and identities secure when surfing, according to the fourth annual UK Internet Security State of the Nation report from Get Safe Online.
The release of the report marks the start of Get Safe Online Week, which aims to further [...]

The Guardian
The IT systems at three London hospitals were shut down yesterday after succumbing to an unidentified computer virus. Managers at St Bartholomew’s and the London NHS trust called a state of emergency when the system became heavily overloaded after the virus struck on Monday.
Engineers shut down email systems and internet access at Bart’s hospital [...]

The closure of a web hosting firm that is believed to have had spam gangs as clients has led to a drastic reduction in junk mail.  Two US internet service providers have pulled the plug on the firm McColo following an investigation by the Washington Post newspaper.
Anti-spam firm Ironport has seen junk mail levels drop [...]

WebProNews
A study on spam from Berkeley and UCSD came back with some pretty intriguing results. The most publicised one was that 1 in 12.5 million conversions is all it may take for spam to be profitable.
Perhaps the most incredible detail of the study (PDF) is that the researchers, led by UCSD associate professor Stefan Savage, [...]

#1 Trojans/Keyloggers/Fast Flux Botnets
These often sit silently on company systems, and steal financial and sensitive data.  Since January 2008 more than 700,000 pieces of new malware have been detected, and at this current rate will more than double during 2009.
#2 Data Loss/Security Breaches
Cyber criminals are increasingly refining their attacks to strike at the heart of [...]

You will continue to get spam, as long as people continue to purchase the products/services advertised, and this figure has increased this year from around 20% to almost 30% of users purchasing a product as the result of a spam campaign accord to security firm Marshal.
The company polled around 600 people, and the found that [...]

About $3 million each month is sent from Australia to criminals in Nigeria, with at least 80 per cent of which was related to fraud.  The most likely to fall prey were residents of NSW, the Queensland fraud squad advised the media.  Police said the figure would climb since even more money was sent to [...]

ACU News PR Release
An Apple iPhone or iPod touch will become a central part of Abilene Christian University’s innovative learning experience this fall when all freshmen are provided one of these converged media devices, said Phil Schubert, ACU executive vice president.
At ACU – the first university in the nation to provide these cutting-edge media devices [...]