Week in Security: Windows 7 a go; Steve Ballmer a pro; ChoicePoint, MoneyGram face woe

A look back at all things security for the past week:

10 things you need to know about Windows 7Windows 7 officially shipped this week, which means end users and administrators running Windows XP (and to a lesser extent, Windows Vista) have some interesting decisions to make.

FTC slams MoneyGram with $18M charge to settle fraud complaintsThis place sounds like scam central. The second-largest money transfer service in the United States, MoneyGram International this week agreed to pay $18 million in consumer redress to settle FTC charges that the company allowed its money transfer system to be used by fraudulent telemarketers to bilk U.S. consumers out of tens of millions of dollars.

Security flubs cost ChoicePoint additional $275,000Not that a $275,000 fine will make your personal data any more secure but data brokers ChoicePoint this week agreed to bolster yet again its data security and pay $275,000 to settle Federal Trade Commission charges it failed on the first go-around to implement a court-ordered comprehensive information security program. ChoicePoint is now required to report to the FTC - every two months for two years - detailed information about how it is protecting the breached database and certain other databases and records containing personal information.

Gaping security hole turned 64,000 Time Warner cable modems into hacker preyA blogger helping to tune a friend's wi-fi network uncovered a gaping security hole in Wi-Fi cable modem routers installed in 64,000 Time Warner subscribers' homes, leaving them open to attack. Time Warner says that within the past week it has patched the problem until the manufacturer can provide a permanent fix, but before that it had allowed administrative access to the routers. Attackers could then run a variety of programs against these routers, says David Chen in his blog Chenosaurus.

Ballmer takes on SharePoint future, software licensing issues, Sidekick woesMicrosoft CEO Steve Ballmer says that the potential of SharePoint shows no signs of having any limitations for the foreseeable future and that Microsoft will have consistent licensing across online and on-premises software, and will protect data in the cloud so episodes such as the Sidekick data loss never happens again.

Gartner on cloud security: 'Our nightmare scenario is here now'At the Gartner Symposium IT/Expo thousands of IT managers packed into sessions on the topic of virtualization of enterprise computers, along with the prospect of adopting public cloud-based services or building private ones. Some say the revolution is underway, and security managers are caught in the middle, losing their earlier controls.

Consumers should clean up their act on personal securityThe growing use of social networking sites is leaving PC inadvertently open to identity thieves warned Hugh Thompson, chief security strategist at People Security. Speaking at the RSA Europe Conference, Thompson said that people were unaware just how many clues they left for fraudsters. He said such carelessness was fuelling the rise of cybercrime. He told the conference about the way he managed to access one of his wife's friend's bank account in a couple of hours using publicly available data - a process that he had previously documented in a Scientific American article. He warned that most people's private accounts could be accessed in this way.

Fraudsters trying to capture bank cards at machinesIf your cash card gets eaten by the automated-teller machine, it may not end up in the hands of a bank employee. European financial institutions are seeing a sharp rise in card "trapping," where criminals use various tricks in order to capture and retrieve a person's ATM card for fraudulent use.

Botnets contributing more than ever to click fraudNetworks of hacked computers are being used more than ever to click on advertisements, a scam known as click fraud that cheats search engines, publishers and ad networks out of revenue.