Stolen data fetches big bucks

Stolen bank account numbers are commanding the highest price in an underground trade of personal details stolen by hackers, according to a survey released by security vendor Symantec, reports PC World.

Bank account details command prices of up to $400, while credit card details sell for between $0.50 and $5. E-mail passwords cost from $1 to $350 each, and e-mail addresses from $2 to $4 per megabyte, according to Symantec's Internet Security Threat Report, which covers the first half of the year.

The online trade in stolen details highlights the commercialisation of Internet crime, with gangs researching, developing and marketing nefarious software for other criminals, said William Beer, director of security practice for Europe.

Resuming an old rivalry, IBM is launching a software giveaway that takes aim at Microsoft on the office desktop, says WSJ.

Today, IBM plans to post on the Internet a package of its own software with applications that square off against components of Microsoft's ubiquitous Office suite, a word processor to rival Word, a spreadsheet to go up against Excel and business-presentation software as an alternative to PowerPoint.

The IBM package, called Symphony, can be downloaded free of charge. The home edition of Microsoft's Office lists for $120 on Internet retail sites. IBM will also give away the Symphony software to customers who buy the latest version of its Notes collaboration software, which costs $145 per user.

AOL wants to begin digital warehousing, reports Associated Press. It says its BlueString service is intended as a repository for media files, and will even keep track of collections stored at competing sites like Yahoo Flickr.

The free offering at bluestring.com represents yet another effort by AOL to break out of its historic "walled garden" of content as it seeks to expand advertising opportunities.

AOL wants to welcome users of Flickr, for instance, even though it runs its own photo-sharing site, AOL Pictures, a service BlueString is to replace entirely next year.

Although AMD has yet to name the date when it will ship the desktop Phenom processor, based on its Barcelona quad-core platform, it has released a three-core CPU that will slide in between the quad-core Phenom X4 superslab and the dual-core Phenom X2, reports APC Mag.

Predictably christened the Phenom X3, it is actually a quad-core CPU on which one of the cores is not working and is thus disabled.

This approach is not new to the tech industry: it has long been rumoured (but never confirmed by Intel) that the single-engine Core Solo processors were dual-core silicon on which one core had blown a fuse.