malware

Dell said human error was to blame for mistakes which led it to ship a number of replacement server motherboards to customers pre-loaded with spyware.

The company declined to say whether it was running anti-virus software at its factory but said it had taken 16 steps to improve processes.

The infection hit replacement PowerEdge 310, 410, 510 and T410 boards. The direct seller said less than one per cent of boards were affected and complete new server systems were quite safe.

Dell is still not admitting how the W32.Spybot worm got into its systems and onto its hardware.

A Dell spokesman said the problem was worldwide but all infected motherboards had now been removed from the supply chain and it was already shipping clean boards.

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Nearly a month after a Google engineer released details of a new Windows XP flaw, criminals have dramatically ramped up online attacks that leverage the bug.

Microsoft reported Wednesday that it has now logged more than 10,000 attacks. "At first, we only saw legitimate researchers testing innocuous proof-of-concepts. Then, early on June 15th, the first real public exploits emerged," Microsoft said in a blog posting.

"Those initial exploits were targeted and fairly limited. In the past week, however, attacks have picked up."

The attacks, which are being launched from malicious Web pages, are concentrated in the U.S., Russia, Portugal, Germany and Brazil, Microsoft said.

PCs based in Russia and Portugal, in particular, are seeing a very high concentration of these attacks, Microsoft said.

The Kraken botnet, believed by many to be the single biggest zombie network until it was dismantled last year, is staging a comeback that has claimed almost 320,000 PCs, a security researcher said.

Since April, this son-of-Kraken botnet has infected an estimated 318,058 machines - about half as big as the original Kraken was at its height in the middle of 2008, according to Paul Royal, a research scientist at the Georgia Tech Information Security Center.

Like its predecessor, the new botnet is a prodigious generator of spam, with a single machine with average bandwidth able to send more than 600,000 junk mails per day.