In its semi-annual spam report, the Russian security experts Kaspersky Lab have concluded the economic crisis has had no bearing on the amount of spam distributed worldwide. However, spammers have had to turn to creating ads for their very own services.

The free instant messaging client Pidgin has closed security leaks in the Linux versions 2.6.0 and 2.6.1 that appeared in connection with MSN.

Iron, a privacy clone of the Chrome Google browser, is now released in its first test version on Linux.

A Linux kernel bug in network socket initialization could allow an attacker to acquire root privileges to inflict damages. The security hole applies to all kernels of the 2.4 and 2.6 series and has been around possibly since 2001.

The Parted Magic LiveCD provides numerous tools for partitioning and data backup and recovery. The newest version 4.4 runs on systems with just 256-MByte RAM and now supports dial-up networking.

With Apache 2.2.13, developers have closed security holes in the popular webserver.

The 2.8.3 release of the free blog software Wordpress fixes some privilege escalation problems left over from a previous version.

The biggest botnet to date is being virtualized using a network of one million Linux kernels. The virtual machines form an experiment in studying the origins of the malware.