A list of countries considering BlackBerry bans over security concerns with data routed abroad:

India - The country of almost 1.2 billion people had threatened to block corporate e-mail and messaging services unless BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. makes data more easily available to its intelligence and law enforcement agencies. The deadline had been Tuesday, but the government is giving RIM a 60-day reprieve as it studies the feasibility of routing BlackBerry services through a server in India. The government also may ask Google Inc. and Skype SA for greater access to encrypted in...

Seven of the 10 safest countries in which to surf the Internet are in Africa, with Sierra Leone rated the safest, according to a study by the Internet security firm AVG.

Researchers compiled a list of virus and malware attacks by country picked up by AVG security software, with data from more than 127 million computers in 144 countries to determine incidence rates of such attacks. Sierra Leone's average incident rate was one attack for every 692 Web surfers. The study was conducted the last week of July.

After Sierra Leone, Niger fared well with one in every 442 surfers likely to be atta...

A critical Windows DLL vulnerability that makes several widely used programs targets for remote hijacks surfaced in the news this week. Among the affected applications are Firefox, Adobe Photoshop and uTorrent. Since the news broke dozens of exploits have already surfaced. Luckily uTorrent was one of the first to fix the vulnerability and now all users are encouraged to update their client.

Due to a DLL load hijacking vulnerability in the Windows operating system, dozens of applications have become a target for remote hijack exploits. Since Microsoft refuses to patch Windows, the developers...

Attorneys general want Craigslist's "adult services" section shut down.

Seventeen attorneys general wrote an open letter to Craigslist on Tuesday, requesting that the "adult services" portion of Craigslist be taken down immediately. In the letter, the attorneys general explained that the "increasingly sharp public criticism of Craigslist's Adult Services section reflects a growing recognition that ads for prostitution -- including ads trafficking children -- are rampant on it." The letter went on to state that, because Craigslist "cannot, or will not" screen the ads, the online ad service s...

A "significant compromise" of U.S. military networks has been acknowledged by the Pentagon two years after the breach was reported in the press.

"In 2008, the U.S. Department of Defense suffered a significant compromise of its classified military computer networks," Deputy Secretary of Defense William S. Lynn III wrote in an article in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs.

"It began when an infected flash drive was inserted into a U.S. military laptop at a base in the Middle East," he explained. "The flash drive's malicious computer code, placed there by a foreign intelligence ...

Facebook is ending support for Internet Explorer 6. Granted, it is only pulling the plug on IE6 in its chat function, but the move by Facebook is the latest effort to shift away from the outdated browser that refuses to die. Facebook's decision illustrates once again why organizations that still rely on IE6 should consider upgrading (finally).

IT admins may not care about the Facebook chat function, but there are many other reasons to abandon IE6.A Facebook Blog post describes the issue behind the decision: "Many of you have told us that sometimes your Chat session comes and goes or even st...

Apple has released a security update to its Mac OS X operating system, fixing a number of critical security issues in the software.

The update, released early Tuesday afternoon, Pacific time, fixes 13 bugs in various OS X components, including core components such as Apple Type Services and CFNetwork. It's Apple's fifth OS X security update this year.

Many open-source OS X components are also patched, including Samba, PHP and ClamAV software.

At least six of the bugs theoretically could be exploited by attackers to run unauthorized software on the Mac, Apple said.

Microsoft's Windo...