Computer Press!

CCleaner hasn’t seen many major revisions since Piriform launched it in 2004, but debuting today, CCleaner 3 includes some extremely useful new features that make it worth the upgrade.
One of the biggest is a drive-wiping tool that can wipe all the data from your hard drive, but can also scrub only the available free space. As with many of the tools in CCleaner, it’s fairly nuanced and allows for a simple one-pass overwrite and three levels of secure deletion. These include a Department of Defense-level three-pass option, a National Security Administration-level seven-pass cleaning, and a 35-pass Gutmann-level deep scrub. Note that the more passes you select, the slower the deletion process.

The end of Lime Wire as it has existed for years appears to be at hand.

U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood issued an injunction today against the company that operates the long popular file-sharing software LimeWire and orders managers there to disable “the searching, downloading, uploading, file trading…and/or all functionality” of the LimeWire software, Lime Wire announced. In May, Wood, who serves the Southern District of New York, granted summary judgment in favor of the music industry’s claims that Lime Group, parent of LimeWire software maker Lime Wire, and founder Mark Gorton committed copyright infringement, engaged in unfair competition, and induced copyright infringement.

A Chandler, Ariz., man has pleaded guilty to charges related to his role in a pump-and-dump scam that inflated penny stock prices via spam and hacked computers.

James Bragg, 41, faces five years in prison and a $250,000 fine for orchestrating the hacking and spamming portions of the scheme, which ran between November 2007 and February 2009, according to prosecutors. He pleaded guilty Wednesday in U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.

Bragg used a Russian botnet operator, named only as B.T. in court documents, to send the spam and to access hacked brokerage accounts and buy the penny stocks without the victim’s knowledge.

Scammers who try to trick victims into downloading fake antivirus software can strike almost anywhere. On Sunday they hit the website of Kaspersky Lab, a well-known antivirus vendor.

Someone took advantage of a bug in a Web program used by the Kasperskyusa.com website and reprogrammed it to try and trick visitors into downloading a fake product, Kaspersky confirmed Tuesday. Kaspersky didn’t identify the flaw, but said it was in a “third-party application” used by the website.

TARING alluringly into the camera with dazzling blue eyes and a rather daring outfit is the Russian student accused of a plot to defraud British and US banks of millions.

Kristina Svechinskaya, 21, has been dubbed the “world’s sexiest computer hacker” after being charged with being part of a gang aiming to steal $223 million. Wearing leather boots and skin-tight jeans, she wept during a court appearance this week. She was expected to appear in court again yesterday, charged with conspiracy to commit bank fraud and false use of passports. If convicted, she could be jailed for up to 40 years.

The PCI Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) issued its first guidance document outlining the point-to-point encryption market, warning merchants of the possibility of vendor lock-in and calling current implementations too immature to properly evaluate.

In the PCI encryption document, Initial Roadmap: Point-to-Point Encryption Technology and PCI DSS Compliance, the council explains how the latest encryption technologies can simplify the validation process by encrypting cardholder data at the time it enters a payment system and transport it safely and securely to payment processors, where it is decrypted.

“There are a lot of these so-called end-to-end encryption solutions cropping up all over the place and it could create a lot of confusion among merchants,” said Bob Russo, general manager of the PCI DSS Council. “This is by no means an endorsement of the technology; it’s just an early document to set the stage for more information to come.”