The internet security experts M86, who uncovered the scam, estimate that at least £675,000 has been illegally transferred from the UK in the last month – and that the attacks are still continuing.

All the victims were customers with the same unnamed online bank, the company said. Last night online banking  customers  were urged to make sure their anti-virus software was up to date – and to check for any missing sums from their accounts.

The attack has been traced to a ‘control and command’ centre in Eastern Europe. However, the nationality of the cybercriminals is unknown. The attacks were carried out when hundreds of thousands of home computers were infected with a type of harmful computer code called a Trojan.

Trojans hide in websites, emails or downloads. Once installed on a computer they can record every type of the keyboard,  steal confidential information or even open up a PC’s security so that it can be controlled remotely from another country.

The latest attack involved a Trojan called Zeus v3 which hides inside adverts on legitimate websites. Once installed on a home computer, the programme waits until the user visits their online bank and then secretly records their account details and passwords – using the information to transfer between £1,000 and £5,000 to other bank accounts.

The attacks began on July 5 and are still progressing, according to Ed Rowley, product manager at M86.

‘In the vast majority of cases, if people had kept their computer’s operating systems and software such as Internet Explorer up to date they would not have been attacked,’ he said.

‘More often than not Trojans exploit known vulnerabilities that can be simply patched and fixed by downloading updates.’

McAfee, the security software maker, said production of software code known as malware, which can harm computers and steal user passwords, reached a new high in the first six months of 2010.

It said total malware production continued to soar and 10 million new pieces of malicious code were catalogued.

It also warned users of Apple’s Mac computers, considered relatively safe from virus attacks, that they may also be subjected to malware attacks in the future.

‘For a variety of reasons, malware has rarely been a problem for Mac users. But those days might end soon,’ a spokesman said.

‘Our latest threat report depicts that malware has been on a steady incline in the first half of 2010,’ Mike Gallagher, chief technology officer of Global Threat Intelligence for McAfee, said in the report that was obtained by Reuters.

The internet security company has passed on details of the attacks to the UK Police Central E-Crime Unit in London.

Britain’s high street banks declined to comment on the attacks, but urged customers to protect themselves from virus attacks.

A spokesman for HSBC said: ‘There are millions of viruses and other malicious software.

‘We urge people to take basic measure to protect themselves from virus attacks.

‘Any customer who is a victim of fraud will be reimbursed by HSBC.’

Last year £59.7 million was stolen in online banking fraud, while another £440 million was lost to credit card fraud.

A Financial Fraud Action UK spokeswoman said: ‘The idea that criminals are targeting people by using malicious software or Trojans is nothing new.

‘Bank systems are hard to attack so they’re having to go through the easier link in the chain, which is the customers.

‘They’re hoping customers aren’t taking security precautions. We’ve been seeing this for the last few years and we’re constantly urging people to protect their computers to try to mitigate the risk of becoming a victim.”

Online banking customers can take measures to protect themselves by keeping their anti-virus software up to date and keeping their firewalls set to the highest level, she added.

Victims of online banking fraud usually get their money back. Earlier this month, an internet security company Trusteer, warned that 100,000 British computers were infected with an earlier version of Zeus.

In this article, TechNewsDaily will walk you through a proper do-it-yourself keyboard cleaning, but not before putting the fear in you of how scummy your keyboard might just be.

Keyboard nastiness

Which?, a U.K. consumer organization, found in a 2008 study that keyboards can be up to five times dirtier than the average toilet seat.

The major culprits for this grodiness are people not washing their hands after using the restroom and eating food at their desks. In the latter case, sticky fingers transfer sauces and edible particles onto and between the keys.

Our fingers also rub skin oils onto the keys, and overall keyboards can become a great place for germs to fester, as several studies over the years have shown.

One common bug that researchers have turned up is staphylococcus aureus, a classic causer of food poisoning, signs of which include nausea and diarrhea. Accordingly, stomach sicknesses caught from computer equipment have been dubbed “qwerty tummy” after the “Q-W-E-R-T-Y” keys on a keyboard.

Unintentional food leftovers have also been found to attract more than just bacteria. Mice – the living, breathing, furry kind, not the point-and-click electronic mouse variety – scamper across keyboards looking for bits of keyboard-captured food, according to the U.K.’s Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC).

A London office cleaning company told the RSC about a client who noticed “seeds” popping out of her keyboard when she pressed its buttons. The woman was puzzled because she did not eat bread or any other seed-containing food items at her desk.

Later, it was revealed that these seeds were mouse fecal pellets.

Sanitation explanations

To avoid such unpleasant surprises, follow these tips for a pristine keyboard:

•    First, read the owner’s manual to check for any product-specific cleaning instructions.
•    Gather your cleaning supplies. A soft, lint-free cloth and a cleaning solution or two – a specialized cleanser, such as Enduster for Electronics, and a germicidal (germ-murdering) solution, such as isopropyl alcohol – should do. (Only use alcohol on a keyboard as repeated use of the fluid can bleach out a monitor.) Also recommended for the task: Disinfecting Desk and Office wipes from 3M.
•    Shut down your computer and unplug the keyboard to limit the risk of electrical damage to either the keyboard or you.
•    Target the crumbs and dust under the keys initially. Begin with an “air duster,” which is a can of compressed gas that blasts out of a nozzle. Follow the instructions on the can, which say for example to leave a couple of inches between the spray can and the keyboard.
•    After loosening up the junk in this way, turn the keyboard upside down and give it some gentle shakes to let gravity and agitation work their magic.
•    With most of the debris gone, now moisten the cloth with the cleaning solutions.
•    Gently wipe across the keys and put in a little extra elbow grease on the extra grimy ones, such as the spacebar. Don’t forget the sides and bottom of the keyboard as well.
•    Let the freshened-up keyboard dry before plugging it back in and getting back to work or play.

Covering your tracks

Another solution to the problem of gross keyboards is buying a keyboard cover. These thin molded latex covers are crafted to fit snugly over the keys on a range of keyboard varieties from different manufacturers.

Covers prevent food from falling through the cracks and dust from accruing in the first place. When it comes time to clean, the covers do not have to be removed and can instead just be wiped down.

“Keyboards with covers on them can be wiped off several times a day in twenty seconds,” said Gill Workman, general manager of Protect Computer Products, a company that makes and sells keyboard and monitor covers. He said this hygienic practice is much easier than having to carefully wipe individual keys and avoiding extra cleaning fluid from leak down between them.

Gillman said his biggest clients include hospitals and dental clinics that are required to keep their workstations sanitized, and restaurants such as McDonald’s where touch screens act as keyboards. The United States military also uses the covers in Iraq and Afghanistan to prevent sand from clogging up computer keys.

Scrub-a-dub-dub

Yet another way to clean a keyboard is to buy a waterproof, dishwasher-safe variety, available from Seal Shield and other companies, and simply send it along for a thorough soaping-and-soaking with the silverware.

Some final commonsense tips for an immaculate keyboard include eating food away from one’s desk – or at least not right over your keyboard – and washing one’s hands often.

In the end, there is little excuse for having a sloppy-looking keyboard, and “qwerty tummy” is not anywhere near as fun as it sounds.

Gallium (especially gallium arsenide, known to chemists as GaAs) has been studied for three decades as a replacement for silicon, since its higher “electron mobility” should produce faster transistors and therefore faster computers, explained Christopher Hinkle, a materials scientist at the University of Texas. This is especially true of a three-way combination of indium (a rare, silvery metal), gallium (another rare silvery metal that in pure form melts at room temperature), and arsenic (a notorious poison that can also serve as a hardening agent).

Mixing them and using the product instead of silicon as the foundation for a semiconductor chip, Hinkle has found, can indeed produce transistors that are 10 times faster than the silicon versions.

Tricky chemistry

Gallium transistors have always run afoul of the electrical interference generated by what he called the substance’s “tricky surface chemistry.” Basically, Hinkle has found that the gallium on the surface forms an oxide (rusts, in other words) and the resulting layer of gallium oxide creates endless reliability problems, he told TopTenREVIEWS, since what he called “dangle chemical bonds” affect how electrical charges move.

“We have already made transistors using the indium-gallium-arsenic material, and they are right around 10 faster than silicon ones,” he said. “But they have an order of magnitude more defects, making them less reliable, and they break down faster.”

However, Hinkle will be presenting a paper next week at the 56^th annual International Symposium & Exhibition of the American Vacuum Society (November 8-13 in San Jose) proposing a solution: coat the material with silicon, or with a less troublesome variant of gallium oxide.

“It’s harder than it sounds — the whole process has not been completely solved,” he said.

The reality

Oxygen is part of the air and so preventing surface oxidation before some other coating is applied is difficult. Meanwhile, the more troublesome variant of gallium arsenide is (of course) the one with the strongest, most stable chemicals bonds, Hinkle said.

He expects that indium-gallium-arsenic circuits will show up in high-end desktop computers, hopefully within a few years. But he did not expect them to automatically be ten times faster than silicon-based machines. The designers may elect to maintain the same speed while running at one-tenth the wattage, or use the same wattage at ten times the speed — or some combination.

Since more watts means higher operating temperatures, and since computer CPUs are already pushing practical temperature limitations when running faster than 4 gigahertz, he expects the designers will lean a little more toward less wattage rather than higher speed, and the result will be systems that are about three times faster.

“The electrons have to move down the tube and hit a target without bumping into air molecules. Pumping out the air gives electrons a good shot at the target,” Gay explained.

Polarized, or magnetized, electrons have potential in many applications, such as improving computers and electronics or creating more energy-efficient light bulbs, and in answering fundamental questions.

With National Science Foundation funding through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), Gay uses these atomic particles in basic and applied research. For example, in the experiment above he uses polarized electrons to answer intriguing questions about the origins of life, such as why all DNA molecules spiral clockwise. The answer may have to do with cosmic rays — a natural source of spin-polarized electrons.  In the process, he’s learning a lot about how polarized electrons behave.

Electrons naturally spin in random directions, cancelling out each other’s magnetic energy. That’s why most things are not magnetic. But when all electrons spin in the same direction, they become magnetized. Known as spintronics, this approach opens many new applications. While scientists are learning to harness electron spin, creating polarized electrons remains complex and time-consuming.

Gay aims to change that. His team is developing a simple, easy-to-use method for producing spin-polarized electrons. A turnkey source of polarized electrons could provide new analytical tools for industry and research.

Whether he’s exploring fundamental questions or developing new technologies, Gay involves his students. He has trained at least 85 undergraduates in his lab. “I really view the mission of these experiments as half physics and half training tomorrow’s high-tech workforce,” he said.

A research team at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) developed an optical frequency-domain imaging (OFDI) device to get the 3-D views inside a human artery. OFDI can look at more than 1,000 points of artery tissue at a time (the previous imaging device made by the same investigators could only examine tissues one point at a time). As they physically probe through the coronary artery, wavelengths are emitted and reflected back, allowing rapid acquisition of the data required to create the detailed microscopic images.

Not only are 3-D images now obtained in seconds, the increased speed also reduces signal interference from blood, which had plagued the MGH researchers’ first-generation technology.

The current study, headed up by Tearney, enrolled three patients for whom OFDI provided detailed images along the length of their arteries — visualizing lipid or calcium deposits, and immune cells that could indicate inflammation — and dramatic “fly-through” views looking down the artery’s interior. More detailed, cross-sectional images of narrowed vascular segments revealed features associated with the type of atherosclerotic plaques that are likely to rupture and cause a heart attack.

Tearney and his colleagues note that these findings need to be duplicated in a larger group of patients, and the time required to process the “fly-through” images — currently several hours —needs to be reduced to provide the real-time information most useful for clinical applications. Combining OFDI with intravascular ultrasound might help with another of the technique’s limitations, the inability to penetrate deep into tissues.

The next step is to ensure this technique becomes a widely available commercial device to interventional cardiologists within a one- to two-year time frame.

iPad Craze Invades Japanese Operating Room video

http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1001q3f8hhr/event/index.html

I am sure that Bill Gates will really envy Steve for having this revolutionary device that changes the way we do things!!

Jobs may be ready to step away from Apple, but not before completing a tablet as his magnum opus.

On smartphones, Apple was late to the market, but if there is another vendor doing a better job of currently defining what a smartphone is, I don’t know who they are. With smartbooks, a new class of product based on smartphone technology that looks like a netbook computer, the market hasn’t even really launched, and already Apple appears to be moving to define it.

Word is they are rushing to try to have a product into the market in the fourth quarter. Were this anyone else, I’d say they had a snowball’s chance in hell of making it, but this is Apple, which likely has a patent on hell snowballs, so let’s chat about the Apple iPad this week.

iPod Sales Slowing

In what was a stellar quarter last quarter from Apple, the one really troubling mark was that iPod sales were slowing. Now, part of this was Apple drawing down inventories in advance of what will likely be a broad product refresh in August or early September, but I think it reflects on the fact that people are focusing more and more on smartphones, and not as excited about MP3 players as they once were. This suggests that Apple needs to move to the next big thing after the iPod, and while they are partially hedging this decline with the iPhone, it will probably be a long time (if ever) before iPhones will ever replace iPods.

Apple needs something exciting this year, and what better than something new and very different.

Newton + Tablet Done Right?

Steve Jobs both panned the idea of a Newton and a tablet PC, and strangely enough, the iPhone, iPod Touch and now this planned iPad are all combinations of both concepts. The iPad is likely the closest to what the Newton was evolving into given its size and capabilities, and the rumored design is identical to a tablet PC, albeit a small one.

If this were anybody else, I’d figure the chances that this will be successful to be slim or none, but Apple’s iPod Touch and iPhone have a user interface that will at least scale to 10 inches (the rumored screen size of this new device), and should work just fine.

Content is Key: Overcoming The Apple TV Problem

The problem for Apple, much like it was for the iPod, which it got done, and Apple TV, which it didn’t, is getting access to the media folks want to watch and play with on the device. It will be about the size of a Kindle DX, but it will need a decent book library if it is going to be used in that fashion. Luckily, there is a Kindle reader already for the iPhone and iPod Touch, but even Amazon doesn’t have perfect access (for instance, the Harry Potter books aren’t available on a Kindle). And Apple has never wanted anyone else to own the critical services on any of their devices in the first place.

Apple TV

This would be a great portable movie and TV viewer as well, but the lack of great content is what has plagued the AppleTV and kept it from joining the iPod, iPhone, and iMac on stage as a truly innovative product. Without decent video content, this just won’t scale to the kind of audience that the iPod or even the iPhone will enjoy. This is probably the most troubling aspect for Apple, because it didn’t really pull this off for Apple TV, and this may suggest the company can’t actually get it done this time either.

Price: Purchase and Wireless

Price will be important too, and it is hard to believe that many of these things will sell at the rumored $800 price. Smartbooks are actually expected to price out below $300 for the most part, and even if Apple were to go for a massive margin, you would think it could bring one out for under $600, if not $500, and hit a price that more would find compelling while still at the high end of the segment. With folks screaming about a sub-$500 Kindle, an $800 device would be difficult to move.

One final problem to work though is wireless access. The Kindle’s bundled HSDPA access from Sprint is wonderful, but it adds several hundred dollars to the price of the device, and putting the iPad on a data plan from a carrier like AT&T would potentially allow an iPhone-like sub-$300 price point. But it would also add a $50 or higher data plan.

These expensive data plans remain problematic, but Wi-Fi isn’t prevalent enough, WiMax isn’t widespread enough, and LTE hasn’t been rolled out yet, which will make the connectivity solution a real problem to solve.

Wrapping Up

If the iPod was a difficulty level of six, and the iPhone was eight, then the iPad will be something like 10 on a scale of one to 10. This will be one of the most difficult products Apple has ever tried to bring to market. Any other company would probably fail, but Apple isn’t any other company. Even if it fails, Apple will have created a potentially unique and advanced offering which could easily blaze the trail for more successful products to follow. I wouldn’t bet on Apple to fail, though. It does that very seldom, and given this may be Steve Jobs’ swan song product, there likely will be more emphasis on getting it right than on any product that came before it.

Given that we tend to remember either the first thing someone does or the last (it’s called primacy or recency) and we think of Steve Jobs now more as the father of the iPhone than the father of the Mac, there is a good chance he will be remembered for this iPad. For his sake, (and for the sake of his employees, given he doesn’t have a sense of humor on this stuff) this had better be a home run.

We’ll see. One thing is for sure: It will be incredibly exciting and I’ll bet Steve, if he can, will actually present this one. You see, this thing could actually become an eBook, smartphone, and netbook killer, and if it did, what a swan song for Steve it would be.