Rob Waugh

Up to 600,000 gamers at risk as emails and other details stolen from online zombie game

Fears of cybercrime have become a major concern for many businesses - with security spending rising at four out of ten firms, a UK survey has found.

Employees bringing their own devices to work is a security headache for most companies - even, it seems, the U.S. military. A report issued by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Inspector General last week pinpointed serious security failings around 14,000 commercial devices used by soldiers and civilians.

Most security professionals have enough to deal with thanks to insecure passwords - but AT&T seems to want its users to keep them clean, too. The “password restrictions” page for AT&T users says, “The password can't contain the words "password", "admin", "pa$$w0rd" or other common words. The password can't contain obscene language."

Britain’s hi-tech government intelligence agency GCHQ should know better than to send passwords in plain text via email - but has been doing so due to “legacy systems”, it admitted in a statement this week.

Emailed wedding invitations have popped back up as a way to distribute malware Will this tactic join other malware-email staples like malicious tax season messages.

Use of pirated and counterfeit Windows software has tripled since 2006, according to analysts IDC - creating a fertile breeding ground for malware. For the report, entitled ‘The Dangerous World of Pirated and Counterfeit Software’, IDC analysts conducted 533 tests on counterfeit software from P2P and web sources.

The new trend for "always online" games such as SimCity and Blizzard's Diablo 3 may be putting gamers at risk, experts warn. The games, which require an internet connection even for single-player gaming, are designed to protect game companies from piracy.

British cyber security experts from intelligence services such as MI5 are to join forces with 160 top British firms to defend against cyber attacks.