Gregg

The sophisticated cyber espionage malware known as "Flame" was discovered after computers within Iran's energy industry were wiped clean of data, a security expert said today.

"This was discovered during the investigation of a wiping of Iran's gas companies' computers," Liam O Murchu, manager of operations at Symantec's security response center, said in an interview Tuesday.

Google's Chrome is about to grab the top browser spot for a full month for the first time from Microsoft's Internet Explorer, data from a Web analytics company showed.

For the month through Monday, Chrome had an average usage share of 32.5%, slightly higher than Internet Explorer's (IE) 32.1%, according to Irish company StatCounter.

Sotheby's will put some Apple history on the block next month, including one of only six working Apple-1 personal computers. The auction house has estimated the motherboard will sell for up to $180,000.

Also up for sale: A memo written by former Apple CEO Steve Jobs during his time at video game maker Atari.

Microsoft will not reduce the price of Windows 8 upgrades, as it did three years ago before the roll-out of Windows 7, a retail sales analyst said last week.

"I would expect upgrade pricing to consumers to be on par with Windows 7," said Stephen Baker of the NPD Group. "They had a compelling reason to get consumers off of Vista and priced [it] to make that happen [in 2009]. But the reason to get consumers onto a more modern platform with a software upgrade is a lot less now than in 2009."

Microsoft yesterday added ammunition to its increasingly aggressive battle to get users off the nearly-11-year-old Windows XP by citing a company-sponsored report that claims annual support costs for the older OS are more than five times that of Windows 7.

Microsoft has been banging the Windows XP upgrade drum for years, but stepped up the campaign in 2012, including starting a "two-year countdown" to the demise of security support. Last month, Microsoft was blunt, saying "If your organization has not started the migration to a modern PC, you are late."

Reports earlier this week that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer predicted unprecedented sales of Windows 8 were wrong on multiple counts, Microsoft and independent analysts agreed.

But while Microsoft said Ballmer was misquoted or misunderstood, the analysts argued that even if the CEO's number of 500 million had been accurate, it meant little about the upgrade's success.

Although Microsoft and Yahoo are search partners, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) may complain that Yahoo's new Axis search add-on is slowing down the browser.

After installing the Axis search extension in IE9 on Windows 7 today, Computerworld found that the next time the browser launched, it popped up a message asking if the user wanted to disable Axis and other add-ons to speed up surfing.

Microsoft yesterday promised that a feature it's added to Windows 8 will put a stop to endless reboots.

Unlike earlier versions, Windows 8 will automatically call up a new menu with repair and recovery options when the software sniffs out problems getting the machine to boot or the OS to load properly.

Google yesterday revealed that the two researchers who cracked Chrome in March at the company's inaugural "Pwnium" hacking contest used a total of 16 zero-day vulnerabilities to win $60,000 each.

The number of bugs each researcher used -- six in one case, "roughly" 10 in the other -- was dramatically more than the average attack. The Stuxnet worm of 2010, called "groundbreaking" by some analysts, used just four bugs, only three of them previously-unknown "zero-day" vulnerabilities.

Google on Tuesday hauled out a tool it last used nearly a year ago to warn users infected with the "DNSChanger" malware.

Starting Tuesday, special messages will be displayed at the top of a Google search results page to people whose Windows PCs and Macs have been infected with malicious code that hijacks their clicks.

Microsoft said last week that a skew toward more exploits on Windows Vista can be attributed to the demise of support for the operating system's first service pack.

Data from the company's newest security intelligence report showed that in the second half of 2011, Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) was 17% more likely to be infected by malware than Windows XP SP3, the final upgrade to the nearly-11-year-old operating system.

The hackers in charge of the Flashback botnet managed to generate $14,000 from their click fraud campaign, but have not been paid, Symantec says.

New analysis of the Flashback botnet and the traffic between infected Macs and command-and-control (C&C) servers exposed the earnings and the lack of payment, Liam O Murchu, manager of operations at Symantec's security response center, said in a recent interview.