'Storm' worm hits family PCs

The worm looks like it was a perfect storm of social engineering, actually. Just as severe storms were sweeping Europe, users got an email saying something like "click here to get the latest weather news," CNET reports. There were six waves of these emailings over the weekend, and the other parts of this perfect storm were that "each new wave of emails carried different versions of the Trojan horse," and the viral code was "pretty much undetectable by most antivirus programs," CNET added. Computer security firm F-Secure told CNET hundreds of thousands of family PCs around the world could've been infected, which turns them into "zombies" (computers controlled by malicious hackers for spamming, denial-of-service extortion, and other ways of making money). Anti-virus software is no longer total protection (if it ever was). Tell your kids to be very careful about what they click on or download. And don't be smug, Mac users, security flaws have been found in Macs too. For example, a critical one discovered earlier this month that "can be exploited if the Mac user has enabled an option in Safari to 'open safe files after downloading'," CNET reported earlier. Mac patches are being worked on too – see this CNET interview.