Apparently, paedophiles have started using viruses to hide their vile stash on strangers computers. And guess what? Nobody believes that it was a virus that put them there when those pictures are found.

People have ended up going to jail because the exams that courts do on your computer are so expensive, judges don’t like paying for them. And people have gone broke clearing their names.

The moral of the story? Use virus-protection software, and don’t go to shady sites on the web. Because, yikes. [ABCNews]

The new feature behaves a cross between a traditional antivirus tool and the “Are you sure you want to open this?” warnings already present in Leopard. I doubt it’s doing any real-time heuristic scanning and it’s definitely not running as a visible app in the OS, but if it’s checking .PKG and .DMG files for malware before you run or mount them, well, that sounds an awful lot like what your average Symantec, AVG or Kapersky product is intended to do.

The first report came from The Mac Security Blog, and it’s been corroborated by Snow Leopard testers over at the MacRumors forums. We’ll try to test this one out as best we can, but it’s looking like Apple may have slipped this slightly unflattering feature into their new OS, stealth-style. [The Mac Security Blog, MacRumors]

The research team of Alfredo Ortega and Anibal Sacco say that when malware infects a system BIOS, it is able to survive multiple attempts to reflash the core software, and extremely difficult to get rid of. Even worse, because Lojack is white listed by virus and malware scanners, any attacks exploiting this vulnerability on a computer will largely go undetected. And for Laptop Lojack to be effective, it must operate like a stealthy rootkit. Unfortunately, it’s installed in the majority of new notebooks from HP, Asus, Dell, Lenovo and Toshiba.

Moral of the story: find a new way to get your stolen laptop back. [ZDnet via Slashdot]

The great thing about this offer is that it’s not just for new customers – any 3 Broadband customer can log on and register for the free download of the AVG Internet Security software suite. After the initial 12 months, customers are given the chance to renew their subscription, which is obviously the incentive for AVG here.

As more people jump on the mobile broadband bandwagon, having decent security would probably help cut down on tech support calls to Three as well, so it’s a win-win-win scenario. It’s actually surprising that we haven’t seen a similar offer earlier.

[Three Internet Security]

Cnet says that hundreds of critical hospital devices across the U.S. have been infected by the Conficker worm. The number of hospitals affected wasn’t disclosed, but the problem isn’t thought to be widespread.

Cybersecurity expert Marcus Sachs broke the news at a security conference in San Francisco, raising the question of what would happen if this were to happen to millions of machines in the medical industry. According to sachs, the devices affected were hospital computers and devices used to control critical equipment, such as heart monitors and MRI machines.

No one is quite sure how the computers acquired the worms to begin with, but most of the Windows 2000/NT machines were to old to benefit from Microsoft’s October patch which fixed many of the vulnerabilities Conficker preyed on. [Cnet via Slashdot]

p.s. Relax people! It’s just a joke. [Thanks Italo!]

Since it showed up in November 2008, there have been variants of the virus released. Conficker has begun updating itself, which has been dubbed Conficker.e. Conficker.e is installing Waledac, a spam bot. In turn, it’ll spam you to remove it for a certain price. The original Conficker virus was supposed to activate on April 1 with the potential of infected Windows computers everywhere doing its bidding. Instead, it lay dormant. Not all Conficker nodes have been acting the same, so what’s really going on? [PC World]