The U.K. government will not exempt universities, libraries, and small businesses providing open Wi-Fi services from its Digital Economy Bill copyright crackdown, according to official advice released earlier this week.

More than 74,000 PCs at nearly 2,500 organizations around the globe were compromised over the past year and a half in a botnet infestation designed to steal login credentials to bank sites, social networks, and e-mail systems, a security firm said Wednesday. The systems were infected with the Zeus Trojan and the botnet was dubbed "Kneber" after a username that linked the infected PCs on corporate and government systems, according to NetWitness. The Wall Street Journal reported that Merck, Cardinal Health, Paramount Pictures, and Juniper Networks were among the targets in the attack. NetWitness speculated that criminals in Eastern Europe using a command-and-control server in Germany sent attachments containing the malware in e-mails or links to the malware on Web sites that employees within the companies clicked on. NetWitness said it discovered more than 75 gigabytes worth of stolen data during routine analytic tasks as part of an evaluation of a client network on January 26. The cache of stolen data included 68,000 corporate login credentials, access to e-mail systems, online banking sites, Facebook, Yahoo, Hotmail, 2,000 SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate files and data on individuals, NetWitness said in a statement and in a whitepaper available for download from its Web site. In addition to stealing specific data, Zeus can be used to search for and steal any file on the computer, download and execute programs and allow someone to remotely control the computer. More than half of the compromised machines were also infected with peer-to-peer bot malware called Waledac, the company said. Nearly 200 countries were affected, with most of the infections found in Egypt, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United States. The news comes after Google announced an attack targeting it and what is believed to be more than 30 other companies and which was linked back to China. McAfee dubbed that attack "Operation Aurora." "While Operation Aurora shed light on advanced threats from sponsored adversaries, the number of compromised companies and organizations pales in comparison to this single botnet," said Amit Yoran, chief executive of NetWitness and former Director of the National Cyber Security Division. "These large-scale compromises of enterprise networks have reached epidemic levels."

Good old Wi-Fi could be the fix to an impending explosion of data on wireless networks. Nearly three years after Apple introduced the game-changing iPhone, wireless operators around the globe are feeling the effects of the wireless data tsunami that is well under way. Even networks that don't support the iPhone are feeling the pinch as a generation of new wireless devices offering bandwidth-hungry Web applications are hitting networks.

Google announced some changes to Google Buzz late Thursday that show it has belatedly recognized the backlash over privacy concerns with the new service. Early users of Google Buzz have found the settings very complicated, especially the ones that pertain to privacy. In a blog post Thursday, Google said it built privacy controls into Google Buzz from Day 1 but acknowledged the most strident criticism--that Google made if difficult to make one's list of followers private--in tweaking the set-up process for the new social-networking service. "... we heard from people that the checkbox for choosing not to display this information was too hard to find, and based on this feedback, we've changed the notice to make it very clear," the company said on its Gmail blog.

Google, never satisfied with the pace of change, plans a test that will provide 50,000 to 500,000 people with fiber-optic broadband Internet access with a network speed of a gigabit per second starting as soon as this year.

To entice security researchers to look for holes in the Chrome browser, Google has announced it will pay $500 for bugs found in the code. But several experts say that's not enough money to motivate skilled vulnerability researchers. "I think it's ridiculous," Charlie Miller, a senior security researcher at Independent Security Evaluators, said when asked Monday for his opinion of Google's new bug bounty program. "It's insulting. It's so low." Under Google's new "experimental" incentive program announced last week people will get paid $500 for select interesting and original security vulnerabilities discovered in Chrome, or $1,337 for particularly severe or clever bugs. That figure refers to the geek term for elite, or "leet," which can be spelled out using the numbers.

It was Google's first-ever Super Bowl ad--and one of their few TV spots at all, to boot. On Sunday, during the third quarter of Super Bowl XLIV, the Mountain View, Calif., tech giant aired an ad called "Parisian Love," featuring a Valentine's-worthy romance spelled out in Google search queries.