National laboratory hacked

The personal information of thousands of visitors to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory may have been stolen during a hacking attack earlier this week, it has been announced.

In what was described by the laboratory as a "sophisticated cyber attack" the details of at least 12,000 visitors to the lab were compromised. A database which contains the names and social security numbers of every visitor to the lab between 1990 and 2004 was breached in the attack.

Currently housed at Oak Ridge is the second-fastest supercomputer in the world, known as Jaguar. Lab spokesman Bill Stair said: "There was no classified data of any kind compromised. "There are people who think that because they accessed this database that they had access to the lab's supercomputer. That is not the case. There was no access at all."

The national laboratory is visited by about 3,000 researchers every year. For information on digital products and services visit Broadband National.

Spam levels rise

The levels of spam on the internet climbed substantially during the month of September, research from the security firm SoftScan has found.

Spam levels rose by a full 39 percent during the month and sometimes 98 percent of all the emails canned by the company were spam. The amount of viruses present during the month were relatively low, however there was a greater variety. Diego d'Ambra, chief technology officer of SoftScan, said: "Since June this year we have seen an increase of 95 percent in the amount of spam we stop each month.

"We are fortunate that the reputation filter we introduced last year, which effectively hangs up the phone to servers sending spam, catches the vast majority of junk mail before it reaches our spam filters". Often network administrators have struggled to deal with the amount of spam present, he added. Recently a hacker broke into the website Art.com and stole confidential information, it has been reported.

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