Cabinet minister Ed Miliband was left embarrassed after apparently sending saucy messages to thousands of people on social networking site Twitter. Mr Miliband's unusually personal message, which was delivered to around 7,000 of his followers at breakfast time yesterday, boasted: 'hhey, i've been having better sex and longer with this here'.

Whitehall IT chiefs have been warned by the intelligence agency GCHQ that security problems with cloud computing could foil their plans to use the technology to slash the cost of public services. The assessment forms part of the first report of the Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC), seen by The Register.

TO the horror of Latvia's political establishment, a mysterious group of computer hackers is threatening to expose the incomes of top officials after stealing millions of government tax records.

The group, calling itself the People's Army of the Fourth Awakening, claimed to have downloaded more than 7.5 million documents, including VAT receipts and income tax returns from the State Revenue Service after exploiting a security loophole on its website.

Cryptographers have broken the proprietary encryption used to prevent eavesdropping on more than 800 million cordless phones worldwide, demonstrating once again the risks of relying on obscure technologies to remain secure.

The attack is the first to crack the cipher at the heart of the DECT, or Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications, standard, which encrypts radio signals as they travel between cordless phones in homes and businesses and corresponding base stations. A previous hack, by contrast, merely exploited weaknesses in the way the algorithm was implemented.

Microsoft has warned Windows users to be on their guard against a piece of rogue antivirus software passing itself off as Microsoft Security Essentials. Security essentials 2010 is a piece of software Microsoft said installs a fake virus scanner on your machine and]monitors and blocks processes it doesn't like. The software will also block access to websites of antivirus and malware companies and flag up a warning message. You can see the list of blocked sites here.

Security essentials 2010 blocks access by downloading a Win32/Alureon component and another Layered Service Provider component, Microsoft's David Wood wrote on the company's Malware Protection Center blog. "This LSP monitors the TCP traffic sent by various Web browsers that the user might have installed, and blocks any traffic to certain domains," Wood said.

Claims made of a major vulnerability in the Microsoft Windows operating system have been refuted.

Jan Fry, head of PCI at ProCheckUp Labs, claimed that the findings by 2X Software, revealed exclusively by SC Magazine yesterday, were a 'little sensationalist'. Yesterday, 2X Software said that with a simple piece of code, an operating system from Windows 7/Server 2008 versions to Windows 2000/Server 2003 could be crashed with malicious applications installed.