Al-Qaeda leader Osama bingo Laden threatened in a new message released Thursday, to kill any Americans held captives by them if the US executes the self proclaimed mastermind of 9/11 attacks or other al-Qaeda suspects.

The 74 second audiotape broadcasted on Al-Jazeera TV shows Osama explicitly mentioning Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was arrested in Pakistan in 2003 and is the senior-most al-Qaeda member in US custody. He is being detained at the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Mohammad was convicted with murder and war crimes related to the attacks of 9/11, 2001 in the US. Officials in Pentagon have said that they will gun for the death sentence. Four of his fellow plotters in the attack are also in custody.

“The White House has expressed its desire to execute them. The day America makes that decision will be the day it has issued a death sentence for any one of you that is taken captive,” bin Laden said, addressing Americans.

After his arrest, Mohammed professed himself as the designer of several terrorism plots and even claimed that ‘with my blessed right hand’ he has assassinated Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was found beheaded in Pakistan in 2002.

In his first appearing in 2008 since his capture, Mohammed said it was his longtime wish to become a martyr, after a judge warned him that he faces death penalty for his confessed role as mastermind of 9/11 attacks.

“Yes, this is what I wish, to be a martyr for a long time,” he declared.

Although al-Qaeda doesn’t not have any American captives now, but another terrorist group called Haqqani – the Pakistan based Taliban faction closest to al-Qaeda is having American Pfc. Bowe Bergdahl, whom they captured in Eastern Afghanistan in June 2009. A video of him was released in December.

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Symantec claims its 2009 Internet Security products will have “zero impact” on PC performance.

Norton Internet Security was once infamous for hogging system resources, but has placed significantly less demand on PCs in recent releases.

Now, Symantec claims this autumn’s product refresh will have no perceptible impact on PC performance. “People have told us ’security software is too big, it irritates me, I turn it off when I’m gaming’,” said Janice Chaffin, group president for Symantec’s consumer business in an exclusive briefing with PC Pro this morning.

“Fundamentally, consumers don’t want to be bothered at all. We’ve set as our goal zero-impact security,” she said.

The company has a number of ambitious performance targets for the 2009 products. Installation will take less than a minute, compared to the eight-minute average of today’s products. And the client software will have an install footprint of only 100MB, compared with 2008’s 400MB.

Are customers really bothered about a 400MB install in these days of terabyte hard disks? Symantec’s Con Mallon says it’s largely a symbolic gesture. “We’re trying to do it for perception,” said the company’s regional product marketing director. “If we’re at 400 meg and the guy next door is on 200 meg, they say ‘you’re bloated’.”

Located in the Southern Sydney suburb of Mascot, the data centre represents a $1 million investment in the vendor’s Software as a Service (SaaS) business model in the region.

Anticipating a robust, educated market in Australia, Webroot COO Mike Irwin said that the Sydney data centre was an important milestone in the company’s expansion in the Asia Pacific region.

“Webroot is committed to servicing the Asia Pacific in the long term,” he said.

Webroot’s range of SaaS offerings, including e-mail management and Web content security, will be hosted on the data centre and provisioned via the Web.

Irwin described the SaaS provision model as “security outsourcing”, and expects it to provide customers with security expertise that will give them access to up-to-date, enterprise-level infrastructure.

While the technology market is estimated to grow up to 10 percent per annum, the annual growth of SaaS uptake has been estimated at 60 to 70 percent.

According to Webroot’s Asia Pacific managing director, Charles Heunemann, the SaaS model will appeal to resource-tight IT departments in Australia.

“Your typical IT shop will be trying to get more juice for their squeeze, so they’ll tend to hang on to some of their on-premise infrastructure for perhaps longer than they need to, and the refresh cycles on technology aren’t as rapid as in other jurisdictions,” Heunemann said.

“With the introduction of our new SaaS, a lot of the customers out there can completely leapfrog the whole appliance play and go straight to the cloud and take care of the problem there.”

The $1 million data centre forms part of a $10 million investment Webroot has planned for the Australian market during the next two years.

All products and services will be delivered via Webroot’s channel partner base, which currently comprises nine partners, including Clearswift and WebSecure.

Courtesy:  IT News

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Internet security experts say the Web has become so overrun with identity thieves that users have no way of knowing which sites are safe.

The San Francisco Chronicle said Wednesday that even the largest and most-familiar destinations are vulnerable to thieves who swipe identification numbers, business e-mails and medical records.

Professional criminals and organized crime have ongoing, sustained campaigns to rob consumers blind, said Paul Ferguson, a researcher for Trend Micro.

The culprits seek out flaws in various popular software packages and hack their way into Web sites. From there they can gain access to the server and attack other Web sites, the newspaper reported.

Experts advise Web surfers to keep their Internet browsers updated and regularly sweep their computers for malicious viruses.

Source: United Press International

Internet security is a big question that is likely to raise eyebrows in the near future. According to a recent report by security company Symantec, the tipping point in internet security is closer than we think. The report highlighted some alarming facts.
By the end of 2007, the number of unique identified threats stood at 1,122,311. Of this disturbing total, 711,912 of the threats were identified in 2007, representing a 468 per cent increase on the previous year.
Such distressing numbers are enough to startle any company CIO or IT manager, who holds charge of ensuring security of systems, vital to the day-to-day running of their organization.
In actual fact, the number of malicious code threats is rising so quickly that Symantec’s experts believe the world may be rapidly heading for a security “tipping point”. This point will be reached when the number of legitimate programs in the world is outnumbered by the malicious or illegitimate ones.
When this happens, the traditional method of blacklisting known malicious code loses some of its effectiveness and appeal. The effort and expense of maintain a list of known bad code continues to increase to the point where it becomes a significant burden on both security companies and their customers.
Instead, a white listing system will have to be implemented. This list will be a comprehensive summary of all legitimate programs that should be allowed to exist on a corporate network. If a particular batch of code doesn’t appear on this list, it must be deemed malicious.
To back its prediction, Symantec pointed to research conducted for the report that looked at the adoption of new applications on Windows-based PCs. The researchers found that, of some 54,000 unique applications deployed on Microsoft Windows PCs, 65 per cent were malicious.
It’s a trend that is not going to slow anytime soon. For organisations to have any hope of maintaining security, a white list system may be the only choice. Any alternative is going to become too expensive and cumbersome to maintain.