Security

Users of that hoary old web mail service Hotmail have a new reason to regret their devotion: Over the weekend, thousands of user names and passwords from the service were posted on a data-sharing service called Pastebin, with potentially hundreds of thousands of additional users at risk.

Over 10,000 accounts on Hotmail (still the largest web-based email service in the world) are immediately known to be affected.

Reports are pouring in now that Conficker, at last, has started doing its dirty work -- and that work is nothing which thousands of malware applications haven't done long before it: Sending out spam.

The activation is being deemed a "quiet" one, as Conficker's creators seem to want to take advantage of the powerful botnet they've built without drawing too much attention to themselves. As a result, Conficker may shape up to be a relatively innocuous exploit compared to some of its massively destructive predecessors, and that's undoubtedly a good thing.

Got an old Nokia 1100 sitting around? You may be sitting on a fortune... albeit with a catch. Certain circles are said to be paying upwards of $32,000 for the handsets, at least those made in Nokia's Bochum factory in Germany. Why? According to reports, the criminal underground has found a way to hack into the phones' firmware to allow for illegal bank transfers by reprogramming the phone number on the handset.