A 2005 FBI study of 2,066 companies found that 90 percent had been victims of cybercrime and 64 percent had experienced financial losses as a result. Worms and viruses caused the most damage. Computer-related crimes cost U.S. businesses US$67.2 billion a year, the FBI said, with an average loss of $24,000.

Botnet hacker pleads guilty

A hacker responsible for creating armies of computers to launch Internet-based attacks and selling those "botnets" to spammers and others entered a guilty plea last week to federal criminal charges in Los Angeles, according to a prosecutor at the U.S. attorney's office. Jeanson James Ancheta pleaded guilty in a U.S. District Court to four felony charges and could face five to 25 years in prison, said James Aquilina, an assistant U.S. attorney. Aquilina said that this is the first time in the U.S. that a hacker has been convicted not only for creating and spreading malicious code but also for making money from it, in this case $60,000.

Linux struck by major KDE bug

Linux vendors have warned of a serious security flaw affecting the K Desktop Environment. The heap-based buffer overflow affects kjs, a JavaScript interpreter used by the Konqueror Web browser and other parts of KDE, KDE developers said in an advisory. The KDE Project released a source-code patch, and Linux vendors followed with binary patches. KDE is one of the two main desktop environments for Linux and Unix.