Within hours of former Pakistani Prime Minster Benazir Bhutto’s assassination on the 28th of December; many hackers exploited her death by creating a trojan horse, said analysts from Symantec, McAffe and WebSense.

Users trying to find the latest news about Benizar Bhutto’s assassination and the current unrest in Pakistan were then promised video about it but needed to download a codec.

WebSense managed to find a site carrying the trojan on Google; with McAffe finding 10 sites hosted on Blogger, Google’s blog hosting service.

Downloading the “codec” instead download a variant of the Zlob trojan horse. “Even death isn’t sacred to some,” said Vikram Thakur, one of Symantec’s researchers, on the company’s security response blog.

AOL has taken a surprising move to stop supporting its Netscape Navigator on the 2nd of February 2008; after stopping development on the 28th of December.

Netscape Navigator was one of the browsers that kicked started what we see now as the internet today. Developed by Marc Andreessen, the co-author of the Mosaic Browser - one of the popular browsers; he released the browser in 1994.

During the boom, it had a reach of 90%; but now it has diminished to a mere 0.6% - being beaten by Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari.

The start of the demise of Netscape came in 2003 when AOL, the parent company, sacked most of the development working on newer versions of the browser. Most of the staff are now working on Mozilla Firefox - which is the second most used internet browser.

Old versions will still be avaliable up on their website; with AOL still committed to using the Netscape brand as an internet portal. Previously, it was to be a “clone” of Digg; but now it has been renamed.

Microsoft is expected to release a new version of their Internet Explorer browser in 2008; while Firefox is developing version three, where it is currently in beta.

nineMSN Music, one of Australia’s music stores that competes with iTunes, has now decided to close shop. In an e-mail just sent to me recently from a source, they will be closing shop on January 21, 2008 at 9pm. “We thank you for your loyalty and support and will email you in the near future with some new and even more exciting music initiatives we have planned.” They said in the e-mail.

As like all music store closures, the DRM will be affected; meaning that you won’t be able to play them again since there is no DRM file in their servers anymore. They have suggested that you should burn them to CD and then rip them again to make sure you keep your music.

They have also said that all subscriptions will end next month, and no subscriptions will be taken. Any store credit should be used now before it closes.

As well, in another twist; they have partnered up with BigPond Music Store to continue that little part of their “MUSICFIX” site that uses downloads.

Hey,

TECH.GEEK wishes everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays (for those who are not Christian) and a Happy New Year!

TECH.GEEK will still be updated for the rest of the holiday period - plus in the beginnings of next month. However, we will be in limited mode; meaning that most updates in Technology News will be missed. Sorry, but some of the team have taken some extended leave.

Anyway, I’ll leave you with the holidays…

The TECH.GEEK Team.

P.S - reawakennetworks is getting another update!!!

Another hundreds of thousands of UK citizens may be at risk of their data missing at the National Health Service Trust - a third time the government has seen its data missing.

Patients data were stolen at 10 different incidents, says the Sunday Mirror.

A CD containing names and addresses of 160,000 children were lost by the City and Hackney Trust in the east of London; with 244 cancer patients records being misplaced by the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells Health Trust in Kent.

The Department of Health has said that there is no evidence that the information has fallen into the wrong hands.

“Since the recent heightened concern about data protection a small number of trusts have reported breaches of their own security rules,” the department said.

The newspaper has also said that the other trusts involved in the third incident were Bolton Royal Hospital, Sutton and Merton, Sefton, Mid-Essex, East and North Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Norwich, and Gloucester Partnership Foundation Trust.

Last week, the government admitted that it has lost 3 million records of learner drivers between September 2004 and April this year.

In November, the Revenue and Customs department admitted that it has lost the data of 25 million people records - nearly half the population, when two disks disappeared in an internal audit.

The Royal Family has now launched its own YouTube account (www.youtube.com/theroyalchannel) ; with it featuring the Queen’s Christmas Message at 3PM GMT on Christmas Day. The new channel will also feature recent and historical footage from the Royal Family. This marks the 50th anniversary of the first televised message in 1957.

Launched at midnight, it was titled “The Royal Channel - The Official Channel of the British Monarchy”, with a picture of the Queen’s guards and Buckingham Palace. Currently, as of writing, the site is now with no logo and is coloured in reddish-purple.

From her Sandringham Estate in Norfolk, The Queen said “I very much hope that this new medium will make my Christmas message more personal and direct,”

“That it is possible for some of you to see me today is just another example of the speed at which things are changing all around us.”

Current footage includes the Queen Mother’s wedding, A day in the life of Prince Philip of Wales and footage from Buckingham Palace.

Melbourne-based MD Web Hosting has confirmed during that the past 2 weeks its servers were hacked and malicious code were embedded into its customers’ website.

The offending IP addresses were from Turkey and Russia.

The code would cause unwanted links to appear on affected web pages, thus creating a “link farm”, which helps a company to improve their search ranking in search engines.

MD Web Hosting says that the problem has been fixed; but Daniel Livingstone, who runs a non-government site, said to Australian IT that he is considering moving his site elsewhere.

“There were so many files infected that we had to take the site down … We’ll have to rebuild the entire site, which can take two days.”

Announced today, Apple and an Apple rumour blog Think Secret have settled after Apple sued the blog over leaking several of Apple’s secrets.

However, the deal comes with a price… that Think Secret has to cease operations.

In a statement released today:

As part of the confidential settlement, no sources were revealed and Think Secret will no longer be published. Nick Ciarelli, Think Secret’s publisher, said “I’m pleased to have reached this amicable settlement, and will now be able to move forward with my college studies and broader journalistic pursuits.”

TechCrunch has noted that they have never gave away its sources.

According to The Spy Report, The Seven Network has banned the popular social networking site Facebook from their computers.

Ranging from senior executives, producers and talent; they have no longer access to the site.

An angry staffer said “It’s annoying for people like us who actually need to use it for work - seriously, we use it for research, trying to locate people and that sort of thing,”

“It’s not like we’re sitting there poking or sending virtual cocktails.”

Users include Sunrise executive producer Adam Boland, Seven News staff Rani Sadler, Nuala Hafner and Sara Groen and former Home & Away star Kate Ritchie have express their anger from the ban.

A Seven spokesperson said that they are “focused on other things.”

The CEO of ANZ Bank, Mike Smith, has said in an investors briefing before its annual general meeting that investing in new technology and also offshoring more jobs to its operations in Bangalore.

“We will do more to further integrate and expand our operations in Bangalore … to reduce cost and foster innovation and improve service. This will free up time for staff in Australia and New Zealand to focus on taking care of our customers,” he said.

ANZ, however, says that it will pursue higher levels of customer service by giving representatives all access to all different satisfactions and interaction.

It also hopes for doubling its profit in 5 years, with the help of the growing economy in Asia.