The activist hacker group Anonymous says it has stolen thousands of emails, passwords and credit card details from a US-based security think-tank.

The hackers claim they were able to obtain the information because the company, Stratfor, did not encrypt it. They say Stratfor's clients include the US defence department, law enforcement agencies and media organisations.

The Austin-based company says it has now suspended the operation on its servers and email.

Attackers have begun to abuse a special PHP configuration directive in order to insert malicious code into websites hosted on dedicated and VPS (virtual private servers) that have been compromised.

The technique was identified by Web security firm Sucuri Security while investigating several infected websites that had a particular malicious iframe injected into their pages.

"We’re finding that entire servers are being compromised, and the main server php.ini file (/etc/php/php.ini) has the following setting added: ;auto_append_file = "0ff"," Sucuri security researcher David Dede said in a blog post on Thursday.

January's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) will be the last one Microsoft will attend.

Announcing its decision on Wednesday, Microsoft's Frank Shaw said the company's product news milestones generally don't align with the timing of the show, which is regularly held in January.

"Microsoft was faced with announcing Windows 8 a month before they want to announce it, when they're unprepared, and it becomes an untimely showcase," Rob Enderle, principal analyst of the Enderle Group, pointed out.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is widely expected to unveil new information about Windows 8 during his keynote speech at the show, and several vendors, including HP, are rumored to be planning to demo products running on that OS at CES.

"Both CEA and Microsoft have agreed that the time has come to end this great run, and so Microsoft will not have a keynote at the 2013 CES," the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) said in a statement emailed to TechNewsWorld by CES spokesperson Tara Dunion.

Computer security involves more than installing an antivirus utility on your PC. Malicious hackers are on a mission to steal money and wreak havoc, and they'll do it by any means possible. The growing number of mobile devices, such as phones and tablets, and the popularity of social networks give them new avenues in which to expand their cybercrime.

Here's a look at the security issues various technologies will face in the coming year.

The amount of malware spreading on phones and tablets continued to surge this year, rising 22 percent over 2010 in the first half of 2011, according to a McAfee study (PDF). Android came under fire -- surpassing Symbian and Java ME as the most attacked mobile operating system, according to the study -- with a 76 percent jump in malware from the first quarter of 2011 to the second. Android became the target due to its open nature and its large market share (43 percent in the third quarter of 2011, according to Nielsen).

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