This is one of those bits of news that bears repeating, particularly if you use online banking.  CNET is reporting about a new type of Trojan horse, known as URLZone, that is designed not to steal your login information for online banking sites, but rather to actually steal your money while you’re on the bank’s website.  URLZone is sophisticated enough that it calculates how much money to steal based on how much is in your account, then displays a false balance to the user so as not to arouse suspicion.

The Trojan is being distributed through emails, infected sites that carry the malware, or an Adobe PDF.   It exploits a hole in Firefox, Internet Explorer 6, IE7, IE8, and Opera running on Windows systems.  According to the firm that identified the Trojan horse, about 90,000 computers have visited sites with the malware, over 6,000 have been infected, and a few hundred have actually been used to steal the users’ money.

For more details, see CNET’s articles here and here.

[via CNET]

Following the Google Labs and Gmail Labs, the people behind the Google Toolbar Team has chosen to free their imagination and build and deliver fast improvements to the Google Toolbar.

Here are the first two creatures of the Google Toolbar Labs.

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Microsoft last night introduced a new service called Live Mesh. After reading a half dozen summaries of the service (none of which had very concrete information), I concluded that Live Mesh is an advanced synchronization tool that does pretty much what Windows Live Foldershare has been accomplishing on my PC for the last two years. Using Foldershare I create one folder on my office computer called “Sync” – then on each of my remote computers Foldershare automatically synchronizes the contents of the folder (and all subfolders). It’s very cool – BUT – I also use Google Apps (documents and spreadsheets) – which don’t require any of this because all data is saved on the web and accessible from any Internet connected computer. This is where Microsoft is getting desperate to close the gap and protect their legacy desktop software. Will Live Mesh be worth the wait? It’s hard to say but you can get in line to test it – and I’ll show you where to sign up.

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