We have just a few more weeks left before we finally get our hands on Konami Digital Entertainment's Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, and the home stretch of the waiting period is killing us. To keep you preoccupied, we decided to feature some of the key characters of the game on a weekly basis to freshen our memories on their roles in the series. This week, we'll shed some light on the mysterious Patriots.

In this day and age, thieves have gone high tech as well. Case in point: certain players of Blizzard's World of Warcraft have had their accounts hacked, and the hackers are apparently using virus-infected FRAPS. More viral news follows after the jump.

Most tech-savvy computer users have always been careful not to get their PCs infected by viruses, spyware, and most especially Trojan Horses. So imagine the uproar when the computing industry found out that Apple had made use of a Trojan Horse of sorts to offer Safari to Windows users. More in the full article.

One of the biggest rules about maintaining the security and integrity of your computer is not to access unfamiliar and questionable websites - yes, including those websites that a certain broadway production song proclaims that the Internet is for. While you may have the latest in computer security programs, malicious entities such as Trojan Horses can still slip past our defenses and wreak damage - and it only takes a case of mistaken identity, as the guys over at Intego have found out, having discovered a malicious piece of code that victimizes Mac OS X users.

So just what is this little bundle of bad news all about? A new Trojan Horse was found lurking in several naughty websites, one that tricks you into giving it full access to your Mac by pretending to be a video codec installer and asking for your unit's administrator password.

Should the user be tricked into doing so, the Trojan Horse will then successfully infiltrate the system and mess around with things inside quite a bit. Before we go too much into the technobabble, let's just say that this is a very bad thing, and would have you giving out your private details to people you would not even give your calling card to.

What's to be done, then? Well, to protect yourself from this potential threat, Intego suggests running Intego VirusBarrierX4 with its virus definitions kept up to date. Of course, there's also the deal about never clicking any website link that deems suspicious, even if you've got a hankering for the adult stuff.

Is the Sony PlayStation 3 a game console with a built-in Blu-ray bundled in or is it in fact a Blu-ray player masquerading as a game console? The Guardian website in the UK thinks it's the latter.

The Guardian interviewed Sony Europe VP Matt Brown and read between the lines to conclude that Sony is propagating the storage format using the PS3 as the Trojan horse to carry the drive that will help win the war against the HD DVD.

"The PS3 is going to help us do the job," says Brown. He explained that by selling the PS3, they bring the number of Blu-ray owners up. That way, even if consumers actually prefer the HD-DVD format, they'll have a Blu-ray drive by default and that gives them a compelling reason to use it and buy Blu-ray discs with games and movies in them.

Evidence for this strategy, the Guardian says, is the fact that the high-end PS3 is priced lower than most Blu-ray players. Thus, the wiser thing to do in this case would be to buy the PS3 and  forget the player. The move is reminiscent of how Microsoft won its browser war against Netscape by bundling the Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system.

Ultimately, the article said that even if the console war is won or lost on Sony's end, its Blu-ray master plan will rake back the megabucks. Research firm Understanding & Solutions say that it's likely that Europe will have four million Blu-ray players, PS3s and PC drives using the format by 2008.

A bold interpretation of the status quo indeed. To read the full article published in the Guardian, click the read URL.

An Alabama man tries again to throw out his conviction instigated by a hacker who broke into his computer and found child pornography. The convicted man identified as Bradley Joseph Steiger, who had worked as an emergency room physician in Alabama. In early 2000, a computer hacker who used the now-defunct e-mail address unknownuser1069@hotmail.com seeded a Usenet newsgroup called alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen with the use of Trojan Horse program called SubSeven or Sub7. Sub7 installs a backdoor in the victim's computer and can allow files to be extracted and a keystroke logger to be installed.

On July 16, 2000, "1069" sent e-mail to the Montgomery, Ala., Police Department saying, "I found a child molester on the Net." The e-mail included an attached photograph of what looked like a girl no older than 6 being sexually abused. The information led back to a computer owned by Steiger. He was convicted of sexual exploitation of children, possession of a computer containing child pornography, and receipt of child pornography, and was sentenced to more than 17 years in prison. Since his conviction, Steiger tried to overturn it, his latest is by filing legal briefs he wrote himself, one of them was filed last month alleging that FBI agents who testified may have withheld evidence relating to the identity of "1069" and that a new trial is necessary.

U.S. District Judge W. Harold Albritton ruled out his request on Aug 2, saying: "There is simply no basis from which to conclude that Unknown User 1069 was acting as an informant of the FBI so as to allow for discovery as to whether the FBI concealed information".

Symantec the Virus Slayer reported sighting a Trojan horse that exploits the Apple Mac OS X LaunchD Local Format String Vulnerability. It provides root access on the Macintosh OSX version 10.4.6 or earlier.

When OSX.Exploit.Launchd is executed, the malicious bug performs the following actions:

1. Exploits the Apple Mac OS X LaunchD Local Format String Vulnerability which may elevate the privileges of a remote attacker's local account on an Apple Mac OS X computer.
2. Uses a crafted .plist configuration file for LaunchD service. In order to exploit LaunchD the attacker must execute the command: launchctl load [MALICIOUS FILE NAME]
3. Runs inside the process of LaunchD which runs with root privileges.
4. Opens a shell with full root privileges which is controllable by the attacker.

However the company also said the Apple Trojan as a minor threat as it has not spread widely and easily removed. To help minimize attacks Symantec gave the following recommendations:

• Always keep virus protection program up-to-date, especially on computers that host public services and are accessible through the firewall, such as HTTP, FTP, mail, and DNS services (for example, all Windows-based computers should have the current Service Pack installed.).
• Enforce password policy to prevent or limit damage when a computer is compromised.
• Configure email server to block or remove email that contains file attachments that are commonly used to spread viruses, such as .vbs, .bat, .exe, .pif and .scr files.
• Isolate infected computers quickly.
• Train employees not to open attachments unless they are expecting them.

If your Mac is already infected, you may download the removal tools from Symnatec.

The digital age has brought con games and rip-offs that grifters like Johnny Hooker and Henry Gondorff (from the 1973 classic, The Sting) could never have imagined in their wildest dreams.

The latest involves sending an SMS text message to victims' cellphones, which thank them for subscribing to a non-existent "dating service." The message states that $2.00 a day will be added to their phone bill until their subscription is cancelled on-line.

According to Websense, the security company who issued the warning, this message has appeared in comments sections of several on-line bulletin boards.

Once the victim logs on to the fictitious "dating service" web site, they are prompted to download a file that turns out to be a "trojan-horse/4559" id="tag" title="">Trojan Horse" - a "virus" masquerading as a legitimate file. Once the Trojan Horse is installed, it turns the victim's computer into a "zombie," which can be controlled remotely by hackers. These machines become a part of a "bot" network, that are then used to launch cyber attacks.

"This is definitely the first time we've seen this specific approach," said Ross Paul, a Websense development manager. "Basically, they're taking a social engineering attack vector with a lot of users."

Websense is monitoring the situation, but at present, cannot divulge suspects' identities (who are "organized rings of people," according to Paul), or whether they are working with law enforcement.