It looks as if Vista's reputation for improved security could be heading for the pages of history. PC Tools has renewed last week's attack on the platform with new figures that appear to back up its claim that Vista is almost as vulnerable as its predecessors.

According to analysis from the Australian company's ThreatFire user base, 58,000 PCs running Vista were compromised by at least one piece of malware over the six months to May 2008, equivalent to 27 percent of all Vista machines probed. Vista made up 12.6 percent, or 190,692, of the 1,513,502 machines running Windows in the user base.

In total, Vista suffered 121,380 instances of malware from its 190,000 user base, a rate of malware detection per system is proportionally lower than that of XP, which saw 1,319,144 malware infections from a user base of 1,297,828 machines, but it indicates a problem that is worse than Microsoft has been admitting to.

Only a week ago, PC Tools revealed that Vista was as likely to be hit with software vulnerabilities as Windows 2000, a claim that was denied by a Microsoft staffer in a blog.

Posted by Annette King in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 16:30

Five people were arrested Monday in Los Angeles and others were being sought in connection with an international online "phishing" scheme that defrauded thousands of victims and hundreds of financial institutions, federal authorities said.

A total of 33 people, U.S. citizens and foreign nationals alike, were named in a 65-count indictment charging them with participating in the Internet-based fraud, prosecutors said. The indictment, unsealed today, was returned by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles.

Five other people were indicted in Connecticut, along with two people who are also named in the Los Angeles indictment, federal officials said.

The Los Angeles indictment charges the defendants with crimes including racketeering conspiracy, bank fraud and aggravated identity theft. The bank fraud charge alone is punishable by up to 30 years in federal prison.

Posted by Annette King in Virus & AntiVirus News at 15:25