Ambassador and Legal Adviser at the Swiss Foreign Ministry Zellweger

By Stephanie Nebehay, Geneva, Reuters – October 16. 2012

http://tinyurl.com/8wzj9r4

(Reuters) – Switzerland has blocked nearly one billion Swiss francs ($1.07 billion) in stolen assets linked to dictators in four countries at the centre of the Arab spring – Egypt, Libya, Syria and Tunisia – the Swiss foreign ministry said on Tuesday.

Swiss authorities are cooperating with judicial authorities in Tunisia and Egypt to speed restoration of the funds, but it is expected to take years, said Valentin Zellweger, head of the international law department at the Swiss foreign ministry.

“Today a total of one billion francs is blocked in the framework of Arab spring,” he told a news briefing in Geneva, giving the latest figures for funds frozen since early 2011.

The bulk of the assets, nearly 700 million francs, are tied to former President Hosni Mubarak and his…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19886241

9th October 2012

Skype, the internet communications platform, is being used by hackers to distribute a “worm” that infects Windows PCs.

When users click on an instant message saying “lol is this your new profile pic?” they unwittingly download a file containing a Trojan horse malware file.

This opens a backdoor allowing hackers to hijack infected PCs and recruit them into a “botnet army”.

Users can be locked out of their machines and held to ransom.

According to internet security specialist Sophos, the worm is a variant of the well-known “Dorkbot” worm which has been spread by social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

When the worm infects a computer it sends out the “lol” message to the user’s contact list.

Unsuspecting recipients think the message has originated from someone they know and click on the link, thereby downloading the malware payload.

Hijacked computers

Skype said in…