Facebook has won a big judgment against a major spammer, who flooded members of the social networking site with “unwanted and, sometimes, inappropriate marketing messages.” Atlantis Blue Capital, run by Adam Guerbuez, will have to pay more than $873 million in statutory and aggravated statutory damages. 

One week after the takedown of McColo, hoster of a major spam hosting network, spam levels remain at a relatively low level, security experts from Marshal8e6 said today. However, they also believe that spammers are setting up a new infrastructure and it may be just a matter of time until spam levels go back up. In fact, McColo has begun to rebuild its server infrastructure already.

Apple is finally catching up with other browser makers in terms of security and has released a Safari web browser with anti-phishing protection. But first look left us wanting more, since we found that the new anti-phishing tools in Safari 3.2 are unreliable and half-baked, to say the least. It appears that Apple rushed the update without the necessary thorough testing. If you ask us, an average user's idea of online security goes far beyond Apple's "preference checkbox" implementation.

Over the weekend, some Windows XP PCs were crippled when a flawed signature update to AVG Technologies’ antivirus software accidently deleted a critical system file, the company confirmed.

Your email inbox may have been revealing an interesting trend lately – many people are receiving Barack Obama-themed emails, as spammers have discovered the President-elect as a new topic to lure users into opening potentially dangerous emails or visiting web sites that host malware.  

Adobe continued its patch party this week and released a patch for critical vulnerabilities in its Flash Player 9 that could allow attackers to bypass the player's built-in security features.

Adobe released a patch for its Acrobat 8 and Reader 8 PDF viewer, addressing a recently discovered security vulnerability that enables attackers to lure users into opening a specifically crafted PDF file, usually sent as an email attachment.

OpenID seems to be having quite the week: Following its adoption by Microsoft, Google has joined the party and offers a similar plan. OpenID is a method of using a single digital persona or identity to use Internet services, regardless where you are on the Internet.

Microsoft announced that Windows Live will now support the OpenID digital identify framework. Users will soon be able to use their Windows Live ID to sign into any OpenID-based website.

An independent security consultant firm team claims that Google's Android platform, which is installed on T-Mobile’s G1 smartphone, suffers from a serious buffer overflow bug that enables attackers to remotely execute malicious code and lure users into visiting sites hiding malware. The vulnerability is serious enough to allow the attacker get access to the G1 handset with the same rights as its owner. Google is aware of the security problem and apparently tries to keep information about the vulnerability secret until a patch is deployed.

Two graduate students from UC-San Diego, Erik Buchanan and Ryan Roemer, have published a paper demonstrating that the process of creating an existing, known form of computer virus can be automated much more easily than was previously thought. Application of a concept known as "return-oriented programming" allow even properly written programs to be taken over completely, thereby becoming agents of the attacker capable of running arbitrary code on the machine. Is this threat real? And should we be concerned?

Netcraft today said that a Yahoo website is currently under attack to obtain authentication cookies from Yahoo users. The Internet analysis firm warns that the data would allow the attacker to gain access to Yahoo accounts, such as Yahoo Mail. Update: Yahoo statement

G-mail, Google’s web-based e-mail client was aching yesterday, full of issues and outages. Last week, a significant outage left many of Google’s customers without access to their e-mail and other Google web services for hours. Since then, the service has been spotty.