A botnet named psyb0t has been nesting for a few months in consumer devices that run on Linux with MIPS CPUs, notably routers. Infested devices connect through a botnet over a private Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server to await commands.

At the CanSecWest Vancouver 2009 conference's PWN2OWN hacker's competition the Safari, Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox browsers were successfully hacked to run code on their systems. The Chrome browser was recognized as being the least impacted by the hackers.

In March (3-8, 2009), CeBIT will once again be opening its gates in Hannover, Germany. The world's largest and most renowned trade fair for the world of IT and telecommunications will be featuring Open Source topics in hall 6. The CeBIT Open Source Forum 2009 will be the venue of daily lectures on the use of Linux and free software - and you can watch them online, live and for free!

Novell wants to expand its SUSE Enterprise Linux into security management by acquiring the technology assets of two software companies.

SSL won't come to a rest: the newest attack isn't about encryption or errors in the Secure Sockets Layer protocol, it's about the weakest link in the chain -- the user.

The idea of an industry-wide common cryptography standard is certainly welcome. But self-interest usually precedes usability, so two industry consortiums are now vying over which standards to adopt, one on the side of Sun and the other leaning toward IBM/HP. Then there is an additional player in the Trusted Computing Group.

The Shoreline Firewall product, also known as Shorewall, has arrived in its 4.2.4 version. The new release includes a configuration tool for IPv6 networks.

The Debian Project has released a sixth update for the current stable version of Gnu/Linux 4.0, codenamed Etch.

The Mozilla project has moved both branches of its Firefox browser to versions 2.0.0.19 and 3.0.5. The updates deal primarily with security issues.