Microsoft's helpdesk is the key in the recent series of Xbox Live account thefts, claims a gaming clan that admits to being one of the culprits.

Microsoft has admitted that its Live OneCare security suite has been accidentally deleting some users' Outlook and Outlook Express emails.

California start-up Shimon Systems has produced a biometrics package designed to make authentication easy on Wi-Fi networks.

You may be carrying a new type of credit card that can transmit your personal information to anyone who gets close to you with a scanner.

The new cards--millions of which have been issued over the past year--use RFID, or Radio Frequency Identification, technology. RFID allows scanners to use radio signals at varying distances to read information stored on a computer chip.

Online ads are not only booming--and scrolling, spinning, shaking, shouting, and singing--they are also watching you even as you are viewing them, capturing your click patterns to create more detailed profiles than traditional browser cookies do.

Behavioral marketing networks such as BlueLithium, Revenue Science, and Tacoda display ads based on your browsing habits. Spending on these behavioral ads will grow from $1.5 billion in 2007 to more than $2 billion next year, according to eMarketer, a market research firm. And the company expects video ads to account for more than a third of that total.

About half of the downloads claiming to be free versions of Microsoft's Vista operating system are actually malicious Trojan horse software, warned security vendor DriveSentry.

All passports issued by the US State Department after January 1 will have always-on radio frequency identification chips, making it easy for officials – and hackers – to grab your personal stats. Getting paranoid about strangers slurping up your identity? Here’s what you can do about it.

With Christmas fast approaching, Santa Claus reached out for a little help from Stopbadware.org this week.

The consumer advocacy group said it was approached by an Incline Village, Nevada, man who had legally changed his name to Santa Claus, who asked them to help figure out why his Web site was being flagged by Google's Web site filters.

A malicious video on MySpace.com pages changes people's profiles when played, embedding itself and adding links to fraudulent Web sites, experts have warned.

The video is a rigged QuickTime file that exploits a MySpace vulnerability and support for JavaScript in Apple Computer's embedded media player, Web security firm Websense said in an alert posted on Friday.

When you walk or run the Nike + iPod sensor in your shoe will transmit messages using a wireless radio," said the researchers. "These messages contain a unique identifier that can be detected from 60 feet away. This information is potentially private because it can reveal where you are, even when you'd prefer for a bad person to not know your location