Stories by John E. Dunn

Virus comes back from dead to hit hard drives

A 'prank' worm that started as an attack targeted at an off-road Slovakian motorcycle club has escaped beyond its intended victims and started wrecking hard disks as far away as the US.

Internet heading for 'perfect storm'

Attacks on the cloud could cause major global outages and the service providers are now quietly worried at the potential for chaos, a survey of the sector has found.

Conficker still going strong, Akamai finds

Russia and Brazil are now the top hotspots for global Internet attack traffic, Net giant Akamai has said in its latest threat report, placing most of the blame on the hardy Conficker worm.

Anti-theft chip turns laptop into 'brick'

Absolute Software has added a new feature to its Computrace Lojack anti-theft software that can remotely turn a stolen laptop into a useless, non-bootable 'brick'.

Freecom outs first ever USB 3.0 hard drive

After 8 years of success the USB 2.0 standard has begun its long journey into obsolescence. Dutch storage company Freecom has announced the first mainstream storage product based on 'SuperSpeed' USB 3.0.

Swiss coder publicises government spy Trojan

A software engineer who created Trojans for the Swiss authorities to intercept Voice-over-IP (VoIP) phone calls has published the source code to his programs in order to draw attention to the surveillance threat posed by such software.

BlockMaster boasts of 'supersonic' USB stick

Swedish outfit BlockMaster has launched what it claims to be the world's fastest secure USB stick, curing, it says, the problematic trade-off between security and performance.

Xandros Presto Linux

Does the average Windows PC or laptop really need to spend two minutes or more booting up and then perhaps half that again powering down? According to Xandros, the makers of the cut-down Linux OS, Presto, if all a user wants to do is browse the web and use a handful of basic applications, it can be done in seconds either way.

Firefox 3.5 now available to download

The latest release of Firefox appeared as promised this afternoon BST on the Mozilla website, with the headline improvement being a claimed performance boost. It also comes with some bugs.

[]