The Crunch: Telstra AGM; McAfee makes trojans

Linked gallery: Photos: Telstra AGM 2009

Telstra held its annual general meeting in Sydney this week and shareholders were united in their dislike for the government's plans to split Telstra into two.

Click to view some photos taken at the Telstra AGM.

McAfee this week held a workshop where media were invited to find out how easy it is to create malware using common open source tools. To make sure none of the little nasties escaped, the malware was let loose on virtualised desktops running an old version of Windows, all connected together on a closed network.

The Crunch was surprised how easy it is to make malicious software using these tools and is not in the least bit surprised that there was a 500 percent increase in malware samples last year.

Dmitri Alperovitch, McAfee's vice president of threat research, painted a gloomy picture.

"Few people realise how worse things are getting," Alperovitch said. "We have seen a 500 percent increase since 2007 to 2008 in the number of unique malware... Just this year alone we have seen a 150 percent increase from the same period last year.

"Across the board things are getting much, much worse on a day-to-day basis and we are not making much of a difference in terms of an industry, a society, in coping with the threat," Alperovitch told iTnews.

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