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Passwords shall be changed on the International Space Station, due to the discovery of a computer worm trained to gather password and send them to its creator.

According to NASA, the worm was found on several laptops aboard the International Space Station, leading everyone to believe that it sprea itself via the station's internal network or via a thumb drive.

The malware was identified as W32.TGammima.AG, a worm originally designed to steal passwords for online games.

It seems that this is not the first incident of its kind. NASA admitted that security slip ups do occur every once in a while, although they continue to be rather rare:

"This is not the first time we have had a worm or a virus," a NASA spokesman told Wired News. "It's not a frequent occurrence, but this isn't the first time."

And it won't be the last time, that's for sure. Good thing that the infected machines were not running critical processes. Or so NASA claims.

Check your Firefox Plugins folder and see if you don't happen to have an unwanted Trojan guest. Chrome users should follow the example, as the malware was reported to affect them as well.

The latest IT threat at your internet banking bears the name of PWS.ChromeInject.A, Romanian security firm Bitdefender reports.

The malware poses as a Firefox plugin and was designed to harvest baking login information every time the user enters certain sites included in the Trojan's list. Collected data is later sent to a server somewhere in Russia.

According to Bitdefender, a quick check in the Firefox Plugins folder will be enough to reveal the infection. Users who do find one of the following files should definitely do their banking on another computer until they clean up the infected one:

- "%ProgramFiles%\Mozilla Firefox\plugins\npbasic.dll"
-"%ProgramFiles%\Mozilla Firefox\chrome\chrome\content\browser.js"

The new attack is quite new, with reports claiming that infections are at a “very low” level.

The next Internet Explorer 8 beta will arrive during the first quarter of 2009, followed by the final release.

The information popped up a in a blog post penned by IE general manager Dean Hachamovitch. Apparently, Microsoft needs more time to analyze all the feedback gathered from every available source:

"Since the release of Beta 2, the team has been absorbed in the data we get from real people about the product.[...]over 20 million IE sessions and hundreds of hours of usability lab sessions.[...] we have scrutinized thousands of threads from user forums and examined the issues that people are raising (not to mention all the times users opt to “Report a Webpage Problem…”). We have also spent hundreds of hours listening and answering questions in meetings with partners and other important organizations.”

Back in July, Microsoft's Bill Veghte had promised that the final version of Internet Explorer 8 would be ready by the end of the year. It seems that Microsoft prefers to be as cautious as possible about this release.

And cautious they should be. The next Internet Explorer version will come packed with CSS 2.1 and HTML 5.0 support. The cherry on the top will be a tag that would enable the correct display of older sites, designed to work with previous IE versions.