However, "there is serious question as to whether the government will be able to enforce [the regulations] in any meaningful way," said David Wolf, CEO of Beijing-based consulting firm Wolf Group Asia.

Data thieves target German speakers

MOSCOW -- Spam e-mail containing a password-stealing Trojan horse program surfaced last week, using a German-language pitch that claimed that an attached file was an official update to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows.

The attached malware is a Trojan called Sinowal that was first detected last December, said Roel Schouwenberg, a senior research engineer at antivirus software developer Kaspersky Lab in Moscow. The malicious code is programmed to try to harvest username and password information for certain banking Web sites in Europe, he said.

Schouwenberg described Sinowal as a type of "man-in-the-middle" malware. He said that even if an end user starts a Secure Sockets Layer trans-action with a bank, the Trojan can insert HTML code that causes a pop-up window to open that asks for a username and password.