Finland called on its citizens to take more care securing their Wi-Fi networks after it emerged this week that about Euro 200,000 (US$245,400) had been stolen from a local bank using an unprotected home network.

A Florida man was found guilty of stealing data from customer information management company Acxiom Friday. The prosecution estimates that Scott Levine and his defunct bulk e-mail marketing firm Snipermail.com stole more than 1.6 billion customer records by hacking into an Acxiom server.

Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) will present several new open source-based desktop and security applications on Wednesday at a local Linux event.

Hackers now mask virtually every Web browser exploit as part of their normal procedure to evade detection by security software, said IBM's X-Force research team Tuesday.

If you have given your trusted employees and key contractors remote access to your network via a client virtual private network (VPN), congratulations! By now, you have seen the productivity and cost benefits from allowing collaboration that surmounts geographical separation.

Researchers at IBM's Almaden Labs have developed a way to keep those nasty worms and viruses from running on computers, without the use of antivirus software.

With the business of Internet banking changing and online threats growing, the industry needs to adapt and integrate security technology across more channels and be more collaborative to reduce fraud, according to one electronic payments specialist.

Remember the old M&M analogy - security is like an M&M candy, hard shell on the outside, soft on the inside. In other words, put up firewalls, built a strong perimeter and you're good to go. Of course, nobody believes that M&M-type security is sufficient in today's world of insider threats, data leakage, mobile workers, thumb drives and sophisticated malware. So, what's the new metaphor? We asked around and came up with a number of interesting and useful ways to think about enterprise security.

The spam and malware tsunami continues to cast a mounting shadow over the Internet this week.

My heart sank when I first saw Al Gore pull out his BlackBerry. It was in the waning weeks of the 2000 US presidential campaign, and there he was on the TV, tapping away on his then-novel converged device. Though I had no evidence, I was positive that whatever he was reading had already been perused by some conservative skunk works, with his responses scrutinized not long after. Given recent revelations about the opposition's ethics and panting obsession with domestic spying, I still suspect that any eavesdropping technically possible at the time was probably being done.

For DuPont, Gary Min may have seemed a model employee. A research chemist at DuPont's research laboratory in Circleville, Ohio, Min was a naturalized U.S. citizen with a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania who had worked for DuPont for 10 years, even earning a business degree from Ohio State University with help from his employer. But Min's veneer of respectability began to crack on Dec. 12, 2005, when he told his employer he would be leaving his job.

A prominent Sydney club has deployed a network firewall solution to protect its gaming rewards system, which can potentially hold $50 million.

As American angst over their government's massive domestic spying program soars, the Victorian Privacy Commissioner has warned responsible handling of personal information will increasingly require deft application of the "best custodian principle".

Finnish security vendor F-Secure has collected twice as many malicious software samples this year than it has over the last 20 years, a trend that highlights the growing danger of malicious software on the Internet.