Provided by CommunityDNS, the information in this post consists of news items in the security-based Internet community.

China’s population of Web users hits 338 million, surpassing population of the United States

With a Internet penetration, or saturation at only 25.5%, China has 338 million Internet users. Fueled by rapid economic growth the growth rate since the end of 2008 is 13.4%. Internet usage via mobile phones increased by 32.1%, representing 155 million users. By contrast, the U.S. population is just under 307 million with an Internet penetration, or saturation of 70%.

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U.S. Dept. of Energy builds attack defense network

Pooling data from intrusion detection systems located at disparate DoE sites, the agency is in the beginning stages of deploying a network to more quickly respond to scans. A new system developed by Argonne National Laboratories will flag things such as port scanning. Based on information on a port scan from one site firewalls at other sites will be reconfigured to block traffic from the scanning IP address.

The following link provides a way to guard against this vulnerability until Microsoft releases a patch.

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Experts link flood of ‘Canadian Pharmacy’ spam to Russian botnet criminals

Using the power of 8 botnets, Canadian Pharmacy is the largest producer of pharmaceutical-based spam. Russian cybercrime groups are suspected as the force behind “Canadian Pharmacy”.

As a whole spam has grown 60% between January and June of this year to 150 billion messages per day. 75% of that spam is “pharmaceutical spam” or “pharma spam” with half of the “pharma spam” coming from Canadian Pharmacy.

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HTC issues Hotfix for Bluetooth Vulnerability in Smartphones

With Bluetooth switched “on” and Bluetooth file sharing “activated”, HTC handsets using Windows Mobile 6 and Windows Mobile 6.1 were vulnerable to attackers who wanted to access all files on a user’s phone.

Comment: This story shows the growing threat to mobile devices.

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Webcams, printers, gizmos – the untold net threats

Interacting with some of the more sensitive parts of a computer network, web interfaces, “gadgets”, such as webcams and printers that connect with computers where never designed to withstand attacks. The NAS (network-attacked storage) units posed the highest number of threats as the unit was susceptible to all five attack classes.

Other devices that can be found in the “gadget” or “gizmo” category include network switches, routers, photo frames, voice over IP phones and other network equipment.

The devices are generally invisible to anti-virus software so even though a computer may be disinfected the secondary devices can keep infecting.

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Virgin Media sets throttle on hardcore hogs

Virgin Media, UK ISP, will begin throttling back those who tend to hammer the network hardest. Throttling will take place between 9:00am to 9:00pm for 2% of its customers. However, If users pay for a more premium service throttling does not apply.

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