By now, almost everyone has heard about the pop up malware that tells you your computer is infected and then tells you to update your security software.  If you haven't, try reading here, here, and here.

Yesterday, the FBI and police in the U.S. and seven other countries shut down a ring that had placed "scareware" on almost 1 million PCs around the world, netting the criminals $72 million and, most likely, very long prison terms.

MSNBC shared the Reuters story online.

A few weeks ago, U.S. federal officials declared that attacks against U.S. Government and other sites could be considered terrorism and acts of war against the U.S.  Guilty parties would be handled appropriately for that charge.  The U.S. has asked the rest of the world to enact similar legislation and to fight against the criminals. 

Last week, Japanese officials passed a law against individuals perpetrating cybercrime.

Eventually, I think (and hope), all cybercrimes that interfere with computers doing their jobs will be classified as terrorism. In the meantime, take some solace that police officials all over the world are doing what they can to keep this type of crime to a minimum.

You probably are beginning to hear more and more about "cloud" computing.  The term "cloud" is another word describing the Internet in all its iterations.  Cloud computing is about not using what we think of as a PC anymore, but having a simple device that accesses the Internet to do what PCs do now.  The device will be more than just a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, but less than a PC.  What I think this means, at least partially, is that we individuals and small businesses will no longer be subject to infections in our PCs ('cause we won't have them), and the cloud will be the target.  That looks to be a much better scenario for us.  We won't have to fight the fight against cybercriminals anymore.  We won't need Internet security packages anymore.  The fight will be handled at a much higher level.

That's great news.  However, I think it will be many years before homeowners and small businesses really begin to use The Cloud (we capitalize the word "Internet", so I figure we should do the same here) the way it is envisioned by the experts.  This will probably happen in my lifetime, but likely not in my pre-retirement years.