Milmont said in an e-mail exchange tonight that he has suffered from a brain tumor from an early age that was discovered when he was 16, around when he began work on the virus.

"It is obvious to me and my family that this greatly affected my mental, physical and emotional state," Milmont wrote. "Most of the illegal activity took place before I was 18, and I wouldn't do it today."

Federal authorities say they have captured the author of an innovative computer virus that infected as many as 15,000 PCs last year.

Jason Michael Milmont, 19, agreed to plead guilty (you can download a PDF of the plea agreement here) in his hometown of Cheyenne, Wyo., to a federal felony charge of unauthorized access to a computer to further a fraud, according to court documents. He reached the deal with prosecutors in Los Angeles and could face as many as five years in prison.

Posted by Annette King in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 15:42

With the cold an flu season most definitely upon us, there is much that the common cold can show us about network intrusion and what can happen once a single compromise has taken place.

As you sniffle and blink your way through this article, think of how your computer responds to malware or directed attack. If the system is healthy and well protected, much as a healthy person is protected by their immune system, then an attack has a much reduced chance of succeeding (and you have a much reduced chance of getting a cold). You and your system can happily perform at pretty much your full levels of performance.

This will hold true up to a point. If you constantly leave yourself exposed to conditions that encourage development of a cold, and if you constantly leave your systems exposed to risk of compromise, then sooner or later you will have a cold and a compromised system. Active defenses will help keep you and your systems from getting sick and they are valid measures to delay or completely avoid the onset of a cold/compromise.

If your computer system is not as well protected, it is like a person with a weakened immune system - both are more likely to contract infection when faced with the same risks that a healthy system and person will not succumb to.

Posted by Annette King in Virus & AntiVirus News at 15:00

NEW DELHI: This is one ranking Google could have done without. According to a recent report by Internet consumer advocacy group Stopbadware.org, Google is one of the top five networks responsible for hosting dangerous websites.

The study describes "badware" as "spyware, malware and deceptive adware."

Google recorded some 213,575 individual websites, till May this year, which StopBadware then mapped to IP addresses.

Posted by Sean Cannon in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 09:45