Snow Leopard is out and users seem generally satisfied with the latest version of the Mac OS X operating system. The release hasn't come without some controversy though, part of which has been the debate over the malware protection features Apple included in Snow Leopard.

The bottom line is that both sides of the debate are correct to some extent. The fact is that there are hundreds of thousands of threats and exploits circulating in the wild that target Windows and only a couple for the Mac. The threats that do exist for the Mac are almost more proof-of-concept, just to show it can be done, than actual attacks.

The release of the 40-watt 6-core Opteron CPU, codenamed ‘Istanbul’, from AMD means servers with more processing horsepower and less power consumption. Businesses will be able to do more, spend less, and save the environment all at the same time.

AMD is still the processor underdog, but it continues to battle Intel for market share. It’s a steep climb to compete against the market dominance that Intel has established, but AMD has continued to drive innovation and keep Intel on its toes.

After months of headlines about the phenomenon known as Snow Leopard, it has hit the streets and reality has set in. It turns out that the updated Mac OS X is.....well, it's simply an updated Mac OS X.

The FCC has begun a three-pronged probe into the wireless industry. The inquiry is partially a response to recent controversies with Apple and Google, but it is more about a shift in ideology and the maturity of the wireless industry as a critical part of the communications backbone.

Much of the difference between the FCC we're used to and the FCC we see today has to do with a difference in philosophy between the Bush and Obama administrations. The Bush administration took a much more hands-off approach to business and let corporations operate largely unregulated and with very little oversight.

The partnership between Apple and China Unicom to offer the iPhone in China has been officially announced. At first blush it seems like a coup for Apple to crack the vast China market, but can Apple deal with a communist bureaucracy even more notorious for doublethink, misinformation, and black-box secrecy than Apple itself?

China has made headlines in recent months with the Green Dam firewall controversy. The Chinese government mandated that all machines sold in China would be required to have the Green Dam Youth Escort web filtering software pre-installed in order to prevent access to porn sites.

Mac users have long relished the fact that malware is nearly a foreign concept to them. Yet, in a tacit acknowledgment of the growing threat of malware on the Mac platform, Apple has added some rudimentary malware protection into Snow Leopard.

Malware is a virtually constant plague for Windows users and an entire industry has been built around protecting the Windows operating system from viruses, worms, Trojans, and other malware threats. Microsoft-bashers claim it's a function of poor design and insecure coding by Microsoft, but security experts have also debated whether or not it is more a function of the virtual monopoly Windows has enjoyed as a desktop operating system.

Social networking services like Facebook and Twitter foster a false sense of security and lead users to share information which can be used by cybercriminals and social engineers. The very concept of social networking is based on connecting and sharing, but with who?

"Cloud" has been one of the biggest tech industry buzzwords of 2009, but there is still plenty of room on that bandwagon. Amazon is hoping that companies reluctant to pay for services like its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) due to security concerns will adopt its new offering- VPC (virtual private clouds).

In theory, the cloud is a good idea for businesses. But, essentially, it's just geekspeak for "the Internet." The cloud enables customers to leverage platforms and software that are more scalable, resilient, and cost effective. Rather than investing in the hardware and software to build the infrastructure internally, businesses can take advantage of economies of scale offered by cloud computing services.

Only a few weeks ago Sony took the electronic book reader market by storm with its announcement of two new devices that undercut the popular Amazon Kindle by $100, but lack the wireless connectivity of the Kindle. Sony's latest announcement of a wireless-equipped ereader shows that the Kindle pricing is actually reasonable.

Remember Yahoo? Apparently the company forgot to read my post about how its star has faded, and it isn't yet ready to shut the doors and call it a day. Yahoo still feels it has a trick or two up its sleeve and deserves a seat at the grownups table with Microsoft and Google.

There are a variety of enhancements and refinements introduced in Snow Leopard, the next version of the Mac OS, which Apple announced will be available this Friday (August 28). The Mac is generally viewed as a consumer or niche platform, but some of the features in Snow Leopard show a maturity that makes the Mac better than ever for the enterprise.

1. Annotations in Preview. New tools enable you to annotate and markup PDF files using Preview. The annotation tools include comments, links, highlighting, strikethrough text, shapes, text, and arrows.

First Nokia blended the mobile device and computer experience with its Microsoft partnership. Nokia's entrance into the netbook market with the introduction of the Booklet 3G is just another step that blurs the line (or muddies the water) between computers and mobile devices.

Last week Dell was making similar headlines. The #2, going on #3, computer manufacturer is venturing into the mobile device market. While at face value it may seem unwise to stray into the highly competitive mobile device market while struggling to maintain rank in its core market, I made the point that perhaps Dell is one step ahead. The mobile device is becoming essentially a microcomputing platform which would make it a natural evolution of its core market.

AT&T and Apple have each responded to the FCC inquiry regarding the rejection of the Google Voice app from Apple's App Store. The problem is that their answers don't seem to be in sync and neither of them really sounds like the truth.

In its response to the FCC, Apple claims that the Google Voice app has not been rejected and is still under consideration. As explanation for removing Google Voice-related apps that had already been approved, such as VoiceCentral, Apple alluded to app store policy related to apps that duplicate iPhone functionality or alter the iPhone experience. I thought the whole point of having thousands of apps was so users could customize the iPhone experience to their liking.

As popular as Twitter has become, its immaturity shows in a variety of ways. It is pure speculation, but what would Twitter Pro accounts look like if I was developing them?

To become a must-have consumer service or a business-critical utility Twitter need to shed some ‘baby fat' and grow up by tweaking some of the ways it does its tweeting. It also needs to invest in a more robust network infrastructure that can withstand spikes in traffic and DDoS attacks, but that is another story.

The FCC is challenging the foundation of the wireless industry business model. Exclusivity agreements and billing practices serve the capitalist free market interests of the wireless providers, but conflict with what is in interest of public good and providing a stable infrastructure.

The wireless industry was already put on notice recently when Apple rejected the Google Voice app for the iPhone. That was not the first issue that woke up the sleeping giant affectionately known as the FCC, but it may have been the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back. There are also potential FTC issues regarding the relationships between companies like Apple and Google which are both partners and competitors depending on the day and the market you look at.

Earlier this year there was a great deal of speculation in the press about Dell entering the smartphone arena. The PC-giant had hired the ex-Motorola executive behind the development of the popular and successful RAZR mobile phone and rumors swirled about whether the Dell smartphone platform would be built on Windows Mobile or Google's Android. It seems that perhaps the speculation should have been around *where* Dell might roll out a smartphone rather than *what* smartphone they might roll out. Apparently Dell has its sights on China, and for good reason.

The battle is on in the United States between mobile device manufacturers like Nokia, Palm, RIM, Apple, and a handful of smaller players. With an estimated 270 million or so mobile subscribers there is money to be made. However, due to the nature of the exclusivity agreements that seem to be standard between mobile service providers and mobile device manufacturers, Dell would need to negotiate an arrangement with only one carrier, reducing the potential pool of customers to less than 90 million at best.

The United States Department of Justice announced today the arrest of Albert Gonzalez, a 28-year old Miami man, in the largest identity theft prosecution on record. Gonzalez is accused, along with two as-yet-unnamed Russian co-conspirators, of compromising more than 130 million credit and debit card accounts from a variety of targets including Heartland Payment Systems and 7-Eleven.

While the Department of Justice should be commended for the successful investigation and indictment of Gonzalez, the arrest will not ‘un-breach' accounts that are already compromised and available on the black market. In an ideal world the arrest would deter future identity theft, but it is unlikely. It is still an almost entirely anonymous crime capable of generating significant revenue and would-be ID thieves are more likely to just consider themselves smarter and better than Gonzalez. He made mistakes, but *they* won't get caught.

Moore's Law is outpacing technology capable of manufacturing even smaller chips and is rapidly approaching the theoretical maximum where it will no longer be possible to expand processing power exponentially....at least not using traditional chip manufacturing techniques. IBM is blurring the boundary between reality and science fiction and attempting to transcend current manufacturing methods by creating self-assembling chips on a skeleton of DNA.

Roughly paraphrased, Moore's Law says that the number of transistors that are squeezed into a single chip, or the overall processing power of a CPU, grow exponentially to effectively double every 2 years. That has been essentially true for over 50 years since the first integrated circuit was developed in 1958. The combination of Moore's Law and the desire to make electronic devices smaller and smaller is pushing the limits of what chip manufacturers can build. Currently, 22 nanometer technology is the smallest that can be manufactured.

Facebook is making strategic moves to evolve into something greater than a Classmates.com with silly quizzes. It purchased FriendFeed, a popular niche social networking platform, and the talented development team that built it. It has rolled out new search functionality, and a new ability to share status updates with the entire network in real-time. It has rumored connections to the recently announced RockMelt web browser and is supposedly working on a payment system. All of these moves work to keep Facebook one step ahead of competing sites and establish itself as a must-use platform.

And why not? Facebook is no Google (yet), but they have amassed over 250 million members in a relatively short amount of time. More importantly, it seems that Facebook reached the critical mass where membership becomes self-feeding and grows exponentially. Every new member of Facebook is reaching out to their friends and family and inviting them to also join the Facebook network so they can share status updates, photos, compete against each other in web-based games, and take silly quizzes about what personality disorder they have.

Verizon tested out its LTE (Long Term Evolution) network this week in Boston and Seattle. LTE is a major step forward in the march toward entirely IP-based mobile communications and full 4G wireless. Once 4G speeds are generally available in major markets across the country it will transform expectations of what a mobile device is capable of and continue to blur the line between communications, entertainment, and productivity.

The marketing from mobile providers such as AT&T and Verizon has been all about 3G for the past couple of years with vendors competing for bragging rights for the biggest 3G network, or the fastest 3G network, or the most reliable 3G network. Mobile devices with 3G connectivity have blazed a path for mobile communications similar to the evolution from dial-up Internet connections to broadband. But, advances in mobile networking have quickly outpaced the expansion of bandwidth and left 3G networks struggling to keep up with demand.

Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, is reportedly backing a startup called RockMelt that is throwing its hat into the increasingly crowded ring of the browser wars. Little is known about RockMelt at this point aside from rumor and innuendo. The idea, supposedly, is to build a new browser from the ground up rather than just re-engineering the existing browser engine model. It sounds like a daunting undertaking which leads me to wonder- why? If RockMelt ends up being the greatest web browser ever built and is victorious in the browser market share war, what exactly does it win?

The Palm Pre has made headlines this week after a mobile developer discovered that his Pre was gathering information and ‘phoning home' to report details regarding his location, the applications he used, and more. Any implication that privacy is being violated is virtually guaranteed to spark a passionate response from users, and this Palm Pre story is no exception. The thing is that this ‘violation' of privacy is not unique to the Pre and is also more or less standard operating procedure for many technologies today.

After a rollercoaster ride love/hate relationship between Microsoft and Yahoo over the past year, and various rumors and potential overtures between Yahoo and Google, the arrangement between Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing search engine is a nail in the coffin of Yahoo search. Despite the revisionist view of history claimed by Yahoo's CEO, Yahoo has been a trusted source of search results for many years. Whatever else Yahoo may morph into at this point, its days as a search provider are over.

At its peak, Yahoo was much more than a search engine. The Yahoo brand extended to an Internet media empire similar to that which Google now enjoys. Yahoo was an advertising provider. Yahoo was a news source. Yahoo was an entertainment destination. Yahoo was a Web portal. However, the various components of the Yahoo empire were built on the foundation of being a search provider.

Perhaps you've heard that Microsoft and Nokia announced a strategic partnership to develop Microsoft application tools and support for the Nokia Symbian-based mobile devices. Some analysts see this as some sort of admission by Microsoft that Windows Mobile is a failure. I don't agree that Windows Mobile is on its death bed just yet. Regardless of how successful Windows Mobile is or isn't, it will never achieve 100 percent market share, but by forging relationships like this Nokia alliance Microsoft can ensure that companies will rely on Microsoft servers and applications no matter which mobile device platform they choose.

That explains why this is such a coup for Microsoft. For Nokia the partnership establishes a strategic advantage over competing platforms, including Windows Mobile. But, what's in it for you? Why should you care? Here are 5 reasons that the partnership between Microsoft and Nokia will benefit you:

Microsoft and Nokia have teamed to bring Microsoft's Office applications, including Word, Excel and PowerPoint, to Nokia eSeries handheld devices. The move is a shot across the bow of RIM Blackberry which currently dominates the business smartphone space. The partnership also enables Microsoft to extend the reach of its messaging and communications products.

Both companies stressed the move to put Office apps on Nokia phones is not an attempt to compete with the popular iPhone - something considered a consumer device, not a business tool. There is no official word on availability of Office on Nokia phones, however, unofficial sources say early 2010.

A Texas federal court ordered Microsoft to stop selling Microsoft Word or any editions of Microsoft Office containing Microsoft Word (that would be all versions of Microsoft Office) pending a final decision in an ongoing patent challenge. Microsoft has 60 days to comply with the order can cease sales of Microsoft Word. Don't panic just yet. Regardless of whether the patent infringement case has merit, Word is not going to go away. Here are 5 reasons that Microsoft Word will survive the patent challenge:

1. The i4i patent is vague. Have you seen the patent in question? The actual patent is attached as Exhibit A to the original court papers filed by i4i. The title of the patent is Method and System for Manipulating the Architecture and the Content of a Document Separately from Each Other. That sounds like XML. Like many patents from the Internet era, the wording seems very broad and the patent seems indicative of problems the United States Patent Office needs to address regarding awarding vague patents.

Google announced this week a project it has been working on to develop a faster, more accurate, and more comprehensive search engine. The announcement of the project, code-named ‘Caffeine' (a clever play on words implying that the project will boost speed), seems a little out of character for Google which usually makes these sort of search engine tweaks under the radar. One thing that the announcement of Caffeine accomplished though is to divert attention away from Microsoft's Bing search engine and the Microsoft/Yahoo partnership news and put Google search back in the headlines.

USAA has just updated its free iPhone application, adding the ability to deposit checks with just an iPhone camera. The bank had previously allowed members to file deposits with a scanner in a similar manner; you just log in and upload images of the front and back of the check.

I installed the iPhone software and tested out the deposit process. I had to repeat several steps, but everything seemed to work well the second time I tried. Legible handwriting counts again for the first time since grade school.

What's better than 2-bits per cell? 3 bits of course. IM Flash Technologies, a joint venture between Intel and Micron, has announced that they have developed a 3-bit-per-cell NAND device that Micron will begin producing for commercial consumption this fall. The technology, dubbed 3bpc (tricky acronym for 3-bits-per-cell), stores more bits per cell than current technology and allows the development of higher density flash memory so it can store more data in less space.

Facebook announced yesterday that it is purchasing rival social media entity FriendFeed. FriendFeed has been more of a niche social media destination, never having grown to the size of a Facebook or Twitter, but it provides a more Twitter-like stream of status updates and real-time search capabilities for Facebook. The combination of Facebook with FriendFeed functionality puts Facebook in a position to compete directly with Twitter and Google.

Microsoft will release the next incremental upgrade of the Windows Mobile platform this Fall, but for many analysts and experts it seems like the new Windows Mobile OS is virtually dead on arrival. Microsoft has done little to raise the bar for mobile devices, and often seems to fall short even in just trying to catch up to competing products like the Apple iPhone. Microsoft needs to develop tools that work on competing mobile platforms to ensure that no matter who wins the mobile device war Microsoft will come out on top for the server and messaging infrastructure that those devices connect to.

Microsoft has stated that it has no intentions of dropping out of the mobile operating system arena, but some analysts see things differently. Gartner analyst Nick Jones noted in a blog post that Windows Mobile is "losing market share; it dropped to #3 in the smartphone market in Q2 2008, falling behind arch-rivals RIM." He goes on to predict that Windows Mobile 6.5 and Windows Mobile 7 are "Microsoft's last chance to succeed in this market."

Artwork: Chip TaylorToshiba mounted a valiant effort at establishing HD-DVD as the high definition optical disc standard. Ultimately, HD-DVD went the way of Betamax video tapes, IBM OS/2, LS floppy drives, and other technologies that came out on the short end of the marketing and technology war. Ultimately, it was Sony's high definition disc platform, Blu-ray, that won, and now Toshiba is jumping on the Blu-ray bandwagon.

Thanks in large measure to a massive array of third-party apps, the Apple iPhone has been riding a seemingly unstoppable wave of popularity. Developers have flocked to create apps to distribute through Apple's App Store to leverage the popularity of the iPhone and reach Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch customers. Recent actions by Apple have disgruntled users and the development community and potentially opened the door to the competition.

Verizon Business announced on Wednesday a new risk-based suite of security tools that include cloud-and-premises-based services. Verizon's Next Generation Managed Security Services Platform is designed to compete with similar offerings from ArcSight and RSA.

Risk-based solutions are the latest in a long evolution from static, perimeter-based solutions offered back in 2000. By 2005 the perimeter was becoming porous, with employees bringing into the office laptops but smart phones, as well as poking holes in the firewall with Web 2.0 applications. By 2009, the notion of a static perimeter had fallen, with IT staffs slowing accepting that they can't protect everything.

More than two days after experiencing a complete outage as a result of a distribute denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, Twitter and other social networking sites such as Facebook are still battling a surge in traffic related to the attack. Twitter has taken some steps to mitigate the spike in traffic and ensure that the site is not knocked offline again, but some of those steps are having an impact on third-party tools that link to Twitter through API's (application programming interface).

Evidence gathered thus far from Twitter and other sites targeted by the DDoS attacks seems to suggest that the attack is actually a politically motivated attack aimed at silencing a Georgian activist. The victim, known by the online handle Cyxymu, uses blogs and social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to express views related to the tensions between Russia and Georgia. In a blog post, Mikko Hypponen, Chief Research Officer of Internet security firm F-Secure, said "Launching DDoS attacks against services like Facebook is the equivalent of bombing a TV station because you don't like one of the newscasters.

Digg announced a new ad voting platform this week. Digg has established itself as a provider of community consensus for content. With this new system, users can vote for or against Web ad content. The more votes an ad gets, the less the advertiser will have to pay for placing that ad. Conversely, ads that are voted down will be more expensive and eventually price themselves out of the market.

Digg has been around and more or less pioneered the concept of community consensus for content. The concept certainly seems to have merit. Rather than an individual having to scour the endless amounts of information on the Web to identify what is relevant or valuable on their own, Digg helps identify valuable content more easily. Users vote on content that provides value and the more votes a given article or web site gets the higher it will rank on Digg.

Unless you have been living in a cave or off the grid for the past 24 hours or so, you are probably aware that Twitter experienced a two-hour outage yesterday morning as a result of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that overwhelmed its servers. The same attack was also targeted at other sites such as Facebook and Google, but Facebook only experienced performance issues and Google seems to have been relatively unaffected. What can Twitter learn from Facebook or Google to help it handle future attacks without a site outage?

First, a little post-mortem on the attack itself. From the information gathered thus far it appears to have been a politically-motivated attack against a single individual related to the tensions between Russia and Georgia. The individual in question, known by the handle Cyxymu, has accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and Google blogs where he posted his views on the continuing struggle between the two states. The attack was apparently aimed at silencing him.

Microsoft released the RTM version of Windows 7 yesterday to the Microsoft technical community. The initial excitement quickly turned to sensational headlines about a "showstopper" or "critical" bug that may put a damper on the Windows 7 excitement and cause people and businesses to shun the new operating system as they did Windows Vista. Those headlines are the very definition of FUD (spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt).

The White House raised privacy concerns this week among those who oppose efforts to pass healthcare reform legislation. In a blog post earlier this week the White House asked supporters to report "fishy" information they receive regarding the debate on healthcare reform by forwarding emails to flag@whitehouse.gov.

For the early adopters of Twitter who have been around for a while, Twitter's two-hour outage this morning may not seem unusual. What makes this morning's outage different from past failures is that this time Twitter fell prey to a denial-of-service attack. Twitter has expanded its capacity to accommodate the normal volume of users and tweets, but there is still a maximum that it is capable of managing. An attacker can effectively shut down the site by generating so many requests that it overwhelms the servers and prevents legitimate tweets from getting through.

What is interesting is the response to Twitter being down. Does it matter? The debate about whether users should even have access to social networking sites like Twitter from corporate or government networks rages on. The Marines banned social networking for the next year and the NFL banned Twitter specifically. Many organizations are still trying to establish policies around the acceptable use of social networking on company time or using company resources.

What does Google do? Most people would say it's a search company. After all, that is where the company built its brand. That is how "google" became a household word. But now there's Gmail, Google Docs, YouTube, and Google Voice, the Chrome Web browser, the Android mobile operating system, the recently announced Chrome operating system, and more. In its effort to take on dominant market players in virtually every area of online technology, Google is perhaps biting off more than it can chew.

Google purchased On2 Technologies this week for $106.5 million. On2 is an established company known for building video compression technologies, sparking speculation about how Google intends to use the new acquisition. That sets them up to perhaps streamline Youtube and make it a profitable venture to square off against competitors like Hulu.

In the wake of making Windows 7 official with the release to manufacturing (RTM) version last week, Microsoft announced the RC (release candidate) version of Windows XP Mode for Windows 7. The virtualized edition of Windows XP SP3 removes a major hurdle facing enterprises that rely on legacy applications built to run on Windows XP.

It is no secret that Windows Vista was not as widely adopted as Microsoft would have liked. Many enterprises chose to ride their existing investment in Windows XP rather than investing in an upgrade to Windows Vista with all of its perceived issues and negative publicity. For some enterprises the fact that business critical applications designed for Windows XP might not run in Windows Vista was also a major consideration making the business case for upgrading that much harder to sell.

Competition is growing in the eBook reader market. There have been plenty of electronic book devices in the past, but in the past year or so the Amazon Kindle has grown in popularity and built some credibility for the struggling market. Now, Amazon claims that Kindle eBooks account for more than 30 percent of the company's overall book sales for books that are available in the Kindle format, and Sony is jumping in again with two devices to compete with the Kindle.

Conventional wisdom has long held that the advent of the personal computer and the Internet will result in the salvation of billions of trees as paper is rendered archaic and we get all of our information digitally. I have been hearing that for 20 years or so. But then again, I've also been hearing that the United States is going to switch to the metric system…eventually.

The Federal Trade Commission began a probe earlier this year to explore the links between the Apple and Google boards of directors. While there are a variety of relationships between the two boards there is no implication of wrongdoing at this point. Whether or not the incestuous relationship between the two directly violates any regulations though, it still lies in an ethical shady area that calls into question whether or not the boards have the shareholder’s best interests in mind.

In a nutshell, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was on the Apple board of directors until he resigned this week. In addition, former Genentech CEO Arthur Levinson is a member of both boards, and former Vice President Al Gore is both a member of the Apple board of directors and a senior advisor to Google. There are some other cross-overs and overlaps as well.

Google has announced their intention to make future versions of their Android mobile operating system more enterprise-friendly and fight harder to gain market share from competitors like the RIM (Research in Motion) Blackberry. Android has a long way to go to be an enterprise-class mobile platform, and Google isn't even heading in the right direction.

Mozilla has announced that the Firefox Web browser has reached one billion downloads and some sources claim that Firefox has attained a solid 32 percent of the browser market. The methods used to calculate market share for web browsers though seems dubious and in some cases seem to betray a bias on the part of the organization gathering the statistics.

Of course, that depends on your source. Some research firms report Firefox with closer to a 50 percent share of the market and actually leading Internet Explorer. The problem lies in how and where the statistical information is gathered. Web sites can determine with some accuracy which browser is being used to connect with the site, but the validity of the statistics is tainted by the quantity and types of sites being monitored.

The Federal Communications Commission has begun an inquiry into Apple’s rejection of the official Google Voice app for the iPhone and their subsequent removal of other Google Voice related apps which had already been approved. The FCC has asked Apple to justify why they chose to reject and remove the Google Voice app, as well as what influence AT&T had on the decision as the exclusive carrier of mobile service for the iPhone.

Apple has been on a roll for the past few years with innovative products and technologies that have captured the imagination of consumers and helped Apple to build a solid fan base. Starting with iTunes and iPods, then taking the mobile phone world by storm with the Apple iPhone. As the marketing tagline says, no matter what you want to do ‘there’s an app for that.’ Apparently that is not true if you want to connect with Google Voice.

Fake ATM machines have taken up residence around Las Vegas.

Computer security experts of all types--from hackers, crackers, and phreaks to security researchers and law enforcement officials--descended on Las Vegas last week for the annual Black Hat and DefCon security conferences. It is probably no coincidence that an attacker also chose last week to plant phony ATM machines around Las Vegas in an attempt to capture account and PIN information and extract money from compromised accounts.