Ken Garen, CPA, Co-Founder and President, UBCC

Infection related emails accounted for almost 25% of the world's spam at its peak Monday. By Mathew J. Schwartz InformationWeek September 29, 2010 12:03 PM On Monday, online attackers unleashed a flood of emails targeting the LinkedIn social network. According to Cisco, at the attack's peak on Monday, the related emails accounted for nearly 25% of all spam globally. The emails arrive with an innocuous-looking -- but fake -- request to become a LinkedIn contact of the sender. Clicking on the provided link launches a website where a screen asks the viewer to wait for four seconds, before redirecting to Google. Cisco said that "during those four seconds, the victim's PC is infected with the Zeus data theft malware by a drive-by download." Zeus -- aka Zbot -- is a sophisticated financial malware toolkit that helps criminals automatically create online attacks, supported by botnets, aimed at stealing people's finance-related credentials, such as bank ac...

Sep 29, 9:58 PM (ET) By JOELLE TESSLER WASHINGTON (AP) - House Democrats have shelved a last-ditch effort to broker a compromise between phone, cable and Internet companies on rules that would prohibit broadband providers from blocking or degrading online traffic flowing over their networks. House Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., abandoned the effort late Wednesday in the face of Republican opposition to his proposed "network neutrality" rules. Those rules were intended to prevent broadband providers from becoming online gatekeepers by playing favorites with traffic. The battle over net neutrality has pitted public interest groups and Internet companies such as Google Inc. and Skype against the nation's big phone and cable companies, including AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and Comcast Corp. Public interest groups and Internet companies say regulations are needed to prevent phone and cable operators from slowing or blocking Intern...

To better track criminals, U.S. wants to be able to wiretap online communications. By CHARLIE SAVAGE, New York Times Last update: September 26, 2010 - 11:08 PM WASHINGTON - Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations of the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is "going dark" as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone. Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications -- including encrypted e-mail transmitters such as BlackBerry, social networking websites such as Facebook and software that allows direct "peer-to-peer" messaging such as Skype -- to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages. The legislation, which the Obama administration plans to submit to Congress next year, raises fresh...

Deal would enshrine in law the founding principles of open standards and net neutrality, and protect the web from political interference. By Claudine Beaumont, Technology Editor Published: 11:46AM BST 20 Sep 2010 The proposal was presented at the Internet Governance Forum in Lithuania last week, and outlined 12 "principles of internet governance", including a commitment from countries to sustain the technological foundations that underpin the web's infrastructure. The draft law has been likened to the Space Treaty, signed in 1967, which stated that space exploration should be carried out for the benefit of all nations, and guaranteed "free access to all areas of celestial bodies". Under the proposed terms of the law, there would be cross-border co-operation between countries to identify and address security vulnerability and protect the network from possible cyber attacks or cyber terrorism. It would also uphold rights to freedom of expression and a...

Published: Monday, 20 Sep 2010 | 7:57 AM ET By: Robin Knight CNBC Associate Web Producer The UK's tax collection agency is putting forth a proposal that all employers send employee paychecks to the government, after which the government would deduct what it deems as the appropriate tax and pay the employees by bank transfer. The proposal by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) stresses the need for employers to provide real-time information to the government so that it can monitor all payments and make a better assessment of whether the correct tax is being paid. Currently employers withhold tax and pay the government, providing information at the end of the year, a system know as Pay as You Earn (PAYE). There is no option for those employees to refuse withholding and individually file a tax return at the end of the year. If the real-time information plan works, it further proposes that employers hand over employee salaries to the government first. "The ne...

Jake Widman 09/20/2010 Every so often, a device comes along that changes the way we live our daily lives and things are never the same again. With today's digital technology, such devices may come more frequently than in the past, but our list revolutionary gadgets extends back two centuries. Read more here: http://www.informationweek.com/news/galleries/hardware/reviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227400522&pgno=1&isPrev=

With budgets in crisis, enforcement efforts gather steam By Alex Johnson Reporter msnbc.com updated 9/17/2010 7:39:27 AM ET It’s too early to know exactly how much the Nebraska chapter of the March of Dimes raised this week at its annual Signature Chefs Auction in Omaha, but odds are that more than 10 percent of the charity’s proceeds are going straight to the tax man. That’s because the March of Dimes went online when it bought about 4,000 T-shirts from a Florida vendor to give to donors during its March for Babies Walk last April. The charity often buys supplies and other materials online, and it also raises money online by selling items at auction — racking up a big tax bill in each case. “We didn’t know that,” said Rosemary Specifically, it is taking away about $26,000, the amount the State of Nebraska says the March of Dimes owes for unpaid taxes on the April purchase and other online transactions over the past five years. Opbroek acknowledged that “we owe the mo...