…both articles are concerned with breaches of copyright and IP abuse…

…what I had principly in mind at that point was the impact of some 4,800 of its customers whose businesses may have been threatened when data, sites and email on four of its servers were lost…

Here's a diagnostic window that your shouldn't panic over, certainly if some cold-calling scammer directs you to it by persuading you to run a diagnostic on your own system. But I'm getting ahead of myself. You might think I've blogged more than enough about support scams already – you know, where someone calls you out

…on the Twitter account owned by LulzSec that they had turned their attention to the NHS. Curiously enough, they seem to have been restrained and even responsible: while there’s an image out there of a message they claim to have sent to an administrator at an unidentified NHS site, they blacked out the details.

…I would suggest that you take any statement like “Grottyscan AntiVirus is best because it detects 200 million viruses” with a pinch of salt. Actually, a whole salt mine…

* Sorry, but I couldn't resist a Crosby reference. I was more than a little irritated over the weekend – see Faith, Hope, Charity and Manipulation - by Microsoft's use of the Japanese disaster to give the Bing search engine a little extra exposure using a chaintweet technique: How you can #SupportJapan – http://binged.it/fEh7iT. For every retweet,

…many scams work by panicking victims into taking some unwise action, whether it’s parting with their credit card details or opening a malicious program, claiming that some problem or illegal action is associated with their computer or IP address, such as transmitting malware or visiting paedophile or other pornographic sites…

Added to the Stuxnet resources article 19th January 2011…

While most of the recent media interest in Stuxnet has centred on the New York Times story, there’s been some thoughtful research published that considers it as just one aspect of larger issues: cyberwarfare, cyberespionage, cybersabotage and so on.

…The NYT article strikes me as being well-researched, well-written, and well worth reading, and the involvement of Dimona is more plausible than much of the speculation I’ve seen, but it’s still hard to distinguish hard fact from sheer guesswork…