Over the course of several days starting at the end of September, authorities in the U.K., the U.S. and the Ukraine arrested more than 100 people involved in a criminal ring that exploited the Zeus botnet. The Zeus Trojan horse program uses keystroke logging to steal online banking information. The crime ring utilized the Trojan to rake in more than US$200 million, police say. Those arrested in the Ukraine were supposedly the technical brains behind the gang. Those in the U.S. and U.K. were charged with creating bank accounts with fake passports and false names as well as receiving money transfers from victims' accounts. The Zeus arrests show that international cooperation will be needed to fight international gangs of online scammers. Later in October a take-down operation conducted by Dutch police, security experts and Armenian authorities resulted in arrests to break up a gang running the Bredolab botnet, a massive generator of spam.

Google Street View feeds privacy debate

In May, Google acknowledged that it had inadvertently recorded Web traffic data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks. The data had been transmitted by Google's Street View cars as they prowled cities and towns, taking pictures used by services such as Google Maps. The Street View cars were supposed to record SSIDs, or Wi-Fi network names, as well unique MAC addresses but also ended up logging email and Web sites users were visiting. The admission sparked outrage in the U.S , Europe and Asia. Private lawsuits were filed in jurisdictions in California, Washington, D.C., Oregon, Illinois, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Investigations were also launched by government authorities in the U.S., France, Germany, the U.K., Italy and France. The brouhaha caused Google to delay the launch of Street View services in some cities. With the privacy and online data security practices of other online giants, such as Facebook, also coming under public scrutiny, regulatory authorities are bound to keep a watchful eye on their next steps.

China claims supercomputer crown

China unveiled at the end of October a supercomputer incorporating thousands of graphics chips and capable of achieving a sustained performance of 2.5 petaflops. In mid-November, the Top500 list of supercomputers made it official: China's Tianhe-1A topped the list. Placing second was the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility's Jaguar system, reported to run at 1.75 petaflops. The race to the next level of supercomputing is on, with China declaring it will build by 2015 at least one system capable of 50 to 100 petaflops, and between 2016 and 2020 will build an exascale system (an exaflop is thousands times faster than a petaflop). The U.S. has made initial steps in exascale funding but has not reserved funds specifically for work to begin.