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The top 10 stories in IT this week

29.10.2010
Attempts by Dutch authorities to take down the massive Bredolab botnet captured headlines this week, with infected PCs downloading fake antivirus software at week's end, and news surfacing that the suspected ringleader of the botnet was bringing in up to €100,000 (US$139,000) a month from his alleged illegal enterprise. In other news, Oracle's intellectual property lawsuit against SAP took a turn, but is still headed for trial on Monday.

1. and : Although the Bredolab botnet was not entirely squelched by the Dutch efforts or the arrest of the group's alleged head in Armenia, security experts believe that the botnet is not likely to recover from the take-down operation. Dutch authorities warned that they expect to make more arrests.

2. SAP will no longer fight Oracle's contention that SAP contributed to copyright infringement carried out by its former subsidiary, TomorrowNow, the company said Thursday in a dramatic turn as it heads toward court on Monday.

3. and : A new Firefox add-on called Firesheep allows its users to scan unencrypted Wi-Fi connections and take over access to Facebook, Twitter and other online services. While there are ways to protect against such online thievery, there is debate about whether those are actually foolproof.

4. and : While the U.S. Federal Trade Commission closed its probe into Google's Street View data gathering without bringing charges against the company, Italian authorities opened an investigation into Google's Wi-Fi snooping.

5. : Oracle went after Google again, updating an existing lawsuit to allege that Google "directly copied" Oracle Java code into some Android mobile-phone software code.