Windows Exploit leads to “amazing amount” of stolen Pentagon data.

“…the intrusion was first detected during an IT restructuring that was underway at the time. By the time it was detected, malicious code had been in the system for at least two months, and was propagating via a known Windows exploit. The bug spread itself by e-mailing malicious payloads from one system on the network to another. The messages themselves were spoofed and appeared to be legitimate missives from other employees. Once the recipient opened an infected e-mail, the worm sent that person’s password and other login credentials back to home base.” Read the full story on Ars Technica

Will Windows 7 Track Your Every Move?

File this one under “You’ve got to be f***ing kidding me!”

“…One good place to look for what might be coming in Windows 7 is an early planned feature list of Vista (then called Longhorn) back in 2003. If one intriguing feature, called Location Awareness, makes its way into Windows 7, it could track your every move…and that could be a good thing.

Microsoft described Location Awareness, along with a host of other planned features, in a document called the Windows “Longhorn” Pre-Release Privacy Statement that detailed to beta testers Longhorn’s expected data collection and use. (Thanks to istartedsomething for uncovering this document and its relation to another potential Windows 7 feature, HomeGroup.) Many of these features never made it into Vista — remember WinFS anyone?

Location Awareness, according to the Microsoft document:

collects computer location data such as address, position, building/floor/room, and stores it locally in the WinFS store. It also collects data that helps to determine the location information of your computer, but is not directly useful as location information itself, such as: MAC addresses of access points near your computer and the IP address of the subnet and default gateway to which you are connected. It collects data from you, from the active directory, from wireless zeroconfig, and from IPhelper.

Read the full article on ComputerWorld.Com