Sophos.com has posted an article on their blog about a new paypal email scam.

The email says that someone has tried to attempt the recipient’s paypal account from a foreign IP address.

It gives an instruction that the recipient must login to his paypal account via a link that is included in the email.

Sophos noticed that the “From” address is Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Therefore, they suspect that the people who send out these emails are the same ones that are behind on the IRS scam.

Source: Sophos

The Register has posted a brief article that there were reports that Skypeln users cannot get incoming calls.

One of the people who use this software said, “This is my main business line and like others its costing me real money, Will skpe help me pay my mortgage at the end of the month ! I doubt it.”

The Register has contacted the company and they said that they are investigating what the problem is. There is no schedule on when they will fix the problem or release a patch for it. The company also do not know how many users were affected by this problem.

Source: The Register

Microsoft has issued a patch today because Windows XP users cannot update their computers with the stealth update that was included in the latest batch of patches.

“When an XP repair CD is used, it replaces all system files (including Windows Update) on your machine with older versions of those files and restores the registry. However, the latest version of Windows Update includes ‘wups2.dll’ that was not originally present in Windows XP. Therefore, after the repair install of the OS, wups2.dll remains on the system, but its registry entries are missing. This mismatch causes updates to fail installation,” said Nate Clinton who is the program manager.

Source: PC World

Five months ago I was doing some web development work for a business which I have created a site for in the past. Although their website is doing well, their offline business is a different story.

Here is a story about being a “business dreamer” that is based on a true story with the names changed to protect the businesses mentioned.
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Microsoft has scheduled to release an add-on program for their Windows Vista Ultimate operating system. It is called DreamScene and it is a video screensaver which first appeared in February during its beta phase.

“While we are excited about shipping DreamScene, the remaining 19 language packs are, unfortunately, not yet ready for release,” said Barry Goffe who is the director of Vista Ultimate.

The revised deadline for the language packs is by the end of next month according to him.

The program, DreamScene, is available to be downloaded only by those who are using the Ultimate version of Vista. It can by acquired via Windows Update.

Source: PC World

This one was recommended by rurbaniak on our forums; PageDefrag is a standalone freeware utility designed to defragment your system files. Standard defragmentation utilities cannot gain access to the Windows page file and registry hive and thus wont show you how fragmented they are nor defragment it. Paging and Registry file fragmentation can be one of the leading causes of performance degradation related to file fragmentation in a system. PageDefrag can gain special access to these files and defragment these files next time you boot the system.
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Microsoft has released the first update on its Home Server operating system.

Here are some of the new things that were applied by the update:

1. If now has the ability to identify whether some software failures are due to a user’s computer firewall.
2. More guidance are provided for creating accounts and passwords for users.
3. OEM hardware partners no longer needed to enter a product key for software.
4. When Windows Home Server (WHS) Updates are processing, it will warn users not to reboot their PC.
5. If for some reason a network interruption occurs, then it will help users make a backup of their home computer.

HP’s MediaSmart server was delayed because of this update.

Source: AppScout

When you are in amongst the trees, its hard to see the overall shape of the forest. A fresh set of eyes can often come up with some innovative and creative ideas for your business.
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A new type of Bubbles worm has surfaced in the internet according to various tech sites.

This new Bubbles worm adds a keystroke logging feature and it appears to focus on the users of a Runescape video game which is a massive online multi-player game.

This virus can shut down a PC’s anti-virus program and it can steal log-in data.

According to researchers, “it logs everything the victim does on the infected PC, storing all logged information to a file in the system32 directory called syswinf32.dll. It shows applications that have run, any action taken within the application, any text typed, and any Web sites visited.”

It spreads itself via Skype.

Source: InfoWorld

A recent news has been published by The Register that there are critical flaws in some Google services and applications.

One of these flaws is located in Google Groups. The flaw in this application lets attackers steal messages and contacts from a user’s Gmail account.

“If you’re good at JavaScript, writing a good exploit for those vulns is [a] trivial matter,” said Giorgio Maone who is a researcher.

At least four internet browsers are affected by the flaw and it includes three of the most popular browsers which are Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera.

Two sites which were run by two different companies were able to steal a user’s cookies according to the article.

Source: The Register