Windows viruses have just allowed China to access US secrets

As the Australian Government continues to grapple with the issue of how best to protect the nation from internet nastiness, the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Communications has just lobbed a major new element into the debate in the form of a mega-report on cyber-crime.

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ISPs would be obliged to provide security advice, inform users when their IP address has been flagged as linked to infected machine, and put in place a policy of "graduated access restrictions" – with disconnection as the ultimate sanction.

AN INSECURITY FIRM claims that the antivirus software vendors can't keep up with the explosion in malware.

NSS Labs say that it takes an average of two days to block a website designed to attack a computer visiting it.

Anti-malware vendors can take up to 92.48 hours to block malicious sites, potentially leaving clients in blissful ignorance of threats to their systems in the meantime.

Security researchers NSS Labs reviewed a range of endpoint security products from ten big-name security vendors and their response to "socially engineered or consensual malware threats".

It said 15,000 to 50,000 such threats were presenting themselves per day.

One alternative to PPTP is OpenVPN and offers a number of advantages, especially as it's free and open-source. It's more secure than PPTP, and more stable too, though it doesn't work on mobile devices natively and isn't quite as easy to set up on a computer, especially older machines. OpenVPN also has the advantage that it's often not blocked in countries where PPTP systems are blocked.

In earlier cases, Trojans and viruses also have been introduced that halted the use of flash drives on Defense Department computers.

While it remains unclear whether the Chinese have developed algorithms that would allow penetration systems that are Top Secret or beyond, it cannot be ruled out, since the Chinese have developed super computers capable of developing encryption and decrypting codes.