Microsoft's Rumored Acquisitions Big for Xbox?

What a week for acquisition rumors as Microsoft is rumored to be after peripheral pimp - Logitech and internet king - Yahoo.

Logitech has long been known as a computer peripheral maker that likes to dabble in console controllers and add-ons. Microsoft has scaled back it's own peripheral manufacturing over the last couple years. If Logitech were to be purchased by MS, it could mean we would see a host of new and quality gaming gizmos for the Xbox 360 and next generation of Xbox hardware. With a quality track record for racing wheels and controllers, there's no doubt MS could benefit from dipping into the R&D department of Logitech for gaming related peripherals.

Next up is the Yahoo acquisition rumor. This rumor has spread like wild fire since word broke from the New York Post. The reason gamers should be interested in an MS purchase of Yahoo is simple. Yahoo is the number one internet site in the world and the biggest competitor to Google on just about every front. Yahoo has R&D going on for just about everything imaginable that has to do with internet technologies. This includes digital delivery services of video and gaming content. And due to recent issues with XBL, we all know MS could use any new help they can get in bettering their online services.
Something to think about: MSN combined with Yahoo. MSN Zone (online gaming) combined with Yahoo games. The list goes on and thanks to the trickle down effect; it could only make Xbox gaming better.

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How low can some people go: Hackers quickly move to exploit Bhutto assassination.

Within hours of the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, malware makers exploited the breaking news to dupe users into downloading attack code, security researchers said Friday.

Searches for news about Bhutto's killing and the ensuing chaos in Pakistan listed sites pimping a bogus video coder/decoder (codec), said analysts at McAfee Inc., Symantec Corp. and WebSense Inc.

For instance, WebSense found such a site simply by using "benazir" to search on Google. Meanwhile, McAfee quickly located 10 sites hosted on Blogger.com, Google Inc.'s blog service, that were spreading the fake codec.

The sites use the well-worn tactic of promising a video -- in this case one of Bhutto's assassination -- but telling Windows users that they need to install a new high-definition video codec, the program that decodes the digital data stream, to view the clip. Naturally, the so-called codec is no such thing, but is instead rigged code that downloads a variant of the Zlob Trojan horse, a back door that can infect the compromised PC with a wide range of other malware.

"Even death isn't sacred to some," said Symantec researcher Vikram Thakur in a post to the company's security response blog.

Other hackers are relying on the news of Bhutto's assassination to draw users to sites that forgo the codec angle and instead conduct drive-by attacks, said Rahul Mohandas, a security analyst at McAfee's Avert Labs unit. "There are a plethora of sites which attempt drive-by installations when unsuspecting users visit search-engine results for 'Benazir Bhutto,'" said Mohandas in a post to the Avert Labs blog this morning. "Many of these compromised pages have malicious scripts, which point to the 3322 domain. These pages contain obfuscated variants of the MS06-014 exploit, which is perhaps one of the most popular of all the exploits we see on a daily basis."

MS06-014, issued in April 2006, patched a critical vulnerability in an ActiveX control that is part of Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC), which are packaged with Windows XP and Server 2003.

Shilling bogus codecs is a popular pastime of attackers. The technique has been used to plant malware on PCs from singer Alicia Keys' MySpace page, for example, and was the vector used by hackers who went after Macs last month.