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The Register reports that the Bagle-AD mass-mailing worm has now been upgraded to a "medium-risk" threat, by McAfee.

Virus writers are distributing viral source code with the latest version of the Bagle virus series, Bagle-AD. Much like its 29 predecessors, Bagle-AD is a mass-mailing worm that is packed using UPX file compression. IT comes in the form of a password-protected .ZIP file, with the password included in the message body as plain text or within an image. The ZIP file contains an executable with the extensions EXE, COM or SCR.

Anti-virus firm McAfee increased the risk assessment on Bagle-AD overnight, reclassifying the worm as a medium-risk threat. Inevitably, Bagle-AD is a Windows-only menace. ®

The full story is here.

Flag Telecom (a Reliance group company) and VSNL (a Tata group company) have finally ended their tiff over bandwidth issues.

Under the deal, which was reached on May 4, ’04, six STM-1s westward and 11 STM-1s eastward would become available immediately to the marketplace, the two companies said in the statement.

An additional bandwidth capacity of about 2.65 Gbits/s would also be available for sale to or from India, they said.

The Economic Times has this story and a carbon copy.

ZDNet Australia and numerous Australian papers/sites are all reporting on the outbreak of the Evaman mass-mailing worm that is at present "servicing" only Australian users, but is likely to spread once the working week begins in Europe and N.America.

Evaman, which spreads to addresses found at the Web site email.people.yahoo.com, arrives as an attachment with a .exe or.scr extension. Infected e-mails generally have subject headings such as "failed transaction or "failure delivery".

Hartman said Symantec was currently waiting for the UK and US week to start in order to see the impact of the Evaman virus overseas.

Click here for the full story.

The Planetary Society has a nice round-up on the latest images transmitted by Cassini of Titan, Saturn's largest moon.
The complete article is available here. A related Time article on the Cassini-Huygens mission can be read here.

The Economic Times has an article covering Wipro chairman, Azim Premji's recent speech in which he outlined the case for India being all set to become a developed nation.

"First, we have world's largest talent pool since we account for 1/6 th of the world population and 34 per cent of this population consists of people below 15 years", he said.

"Projections of the demographic profile by many experts indicate that especially among the developed countries, by about 2050, a large proportion -- in some cases even as much as 70 per cent of the population will be of 70 years and above age. It is in this context that we have the opportunity of building the world's largest talent pool," Premji said.

The article can be reached here.

The Economic Times is carrying yet another story on the probability of China attracting India's BPO businesses in the next few years - this time, precipitated by the visit of a US congressman, who is "certain" that India is losing jobs to China.

It is not that Indian companies are not aware of the Chinese threat. IT giants like Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys have picked outsourcing to China as a future trend and are hiring Chinese staff and opening branches in China.

By all accounts India and China are the superpowers of the future with Goldman Sachs predicting that even if the Indian economy continues to grow over the next 20 years at just the same pace as it has over the past ten years (about five and a half per cent each year), it will become the third largest economy in the world, after US and China. If it can match China's growth rate (more than seven per cent a year) its economy will, within 50 years, exceed China's and be the world's second largest economy!

2054 is a while away yet..

Apple, Opera, have announced the development of a new plug-in API that serves as an alternative to Internet Explorer's ActiveX based system. The ActiveX functionality has been largely to blame for last week's security attacks.

The three browser makers are working with plug-in makers Macromedia Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Adobe Systems Inc. on the extension. Plug-ins allow other software programs, such as Macromedia Flash or Sun's Java, to run within a browser and provide multimedia content.

The new extension, unveiled Wednesday, provides a unified approach for developing and running scriptable plug-ins across browsers from Mozilla, Opera and Apple, Baker said. Browsers should begin shipping with the extension by the fall, and Mozilla plans to begin including in the next few weeks in its nightly builds for developers.

eWeek has this story.

The President, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, advised defence scientists to shun proprietary systems and opt for open source codes to enhance software security in defence networks.

"Open source codes can easily introduce the users to build security algorithms in the system without the dependence of proprietary platforms. We should take maximum care to ensure that our solution is unique to protect our own defence security solutions implemented on open platforms," the President observed at the silver jubilee celebration of the Indian Navy's Weapons and Electronic System Engineering Establishment (WESEE).

During his interaction with IT experts in civilian and defence fields, Mr. Kalam has consistently advocated the use of open source software over proprietary software whose building block is rarely disclosed by corporates who own and sell them.

The Hindu has this article.

Microsoft via it's Windows Update facility, has released what seems to be a temporary workaround, to fix the IE flaws which were exploited last week.

Microsoft's configuration change blocks the ability of the ADODB.screen ActiveX component to write to the PC's hard drive. ActiveX, which adds interactivity to Web sites viewed with Internet Explorer, has long been thought to have security issues.

This particular vulnerability has been known about for more than 9 months, said David Endler, director of incident response for security company Tipping Point.

"Though written configuration hardening instructions have been available online for a while, it's nice to finally see this particular security tweak in Internet Explorer distributed to the masses, even if it's long overdue," he said.

ZDNet has this story.

Techweb notes that Google have amended the terms and conditions for their GMail service, warning users that they may not “sell, trade, resell, or otherwise exploit for any unauthorized commercial purpose or transfer any Gmail account.”

Bartering invitations, however, is still permitted as long as money doesn't change hands. A cottage industry spawned by gmailswap.com puts eager owners of invitations in contact with the desperate, who will do seemingly anything to get a Gmail account.

A gmailswap.com poster claiming to be a 23-year-old, “hot enough” woman, for instance, promised to act out any episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in exchange for an account.

Click here for the full story.