The emails you forward to all your friends with pictures of cute pets, attached PDF or PowerPoint documents, and even “clean but funny” jokes are more than just spam. You’re helping to spread malware, embedded software that turns your computer, and the recipient’s, into ‘bots’—robots that do the bidding of a command and control (C&C) computer to send spam. Nearly 90% of email traffic in North America is spam, and nearly 40% comes from a single network of hijacked computers…probably including yours.

Vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer and Adobe Reader are exploited by criminals to create networks of thousands of computers to send spam messages, usually promoting pharmaceuticals. In fact, five botnets account for 75% of all spam, and 80% if it is for drugs from the likes of Canadian Pharmacy.

In a continuing escalation of tactics and defenses, anti-detection techniques have proliferated to help cybercriminals stay under the radar as long as possible. Sure your firewall and anti-virus software helps. But only 1 in 40 anti-virus programs detected a recent virus. In any event, when a virus is detected, the criminals devise a new exploit to stay in business.

Surprisingly, most of the web attacks and malware distribution takes place using exploits that were reported and fixed by software vendors and computer manufacturers over a year ago. Unfortunately, most people don’t keep their software up to date and don’t install the latest patches.

Over 40% of the malicious code comes from the U.S., while about 15% comes from China, with the rest origionating in Russia, Germany, Korea, France, Spain, Poland, South Africa, and the UK (in that order), according to a recent report by M86 Security.

Do yourself and your friends a favor and stop forwarding all those pictures and jokes and slideshows. And update your system and application software to the latest versions!

Working at home as a writer, in this era of the world wide web, I’m occasionally stopped in my tracks by how small the world is and how huge our cultural differences are.

This was brought home today as I talked about cybersecurity with Doron Pely, a former Israeli intelligence officer. I’m in California, he’s in Israel, and Skype allowed us to talk as easily as I talk to friends a few miles away or on the East Coast.

Pely is trying to understand how the methods of settling disputes in the multi-cultural community of Gaza and surrounding area might be use to solve problems in other areas of the world. If and when they manage to figure them out there, of course.

The problem today, he says, is that interest-based negotiation is a western technique that’s culturally impossible for Muslim communities to understand, nevermind accept. Tribal by nature and history, agreements are reached with the help of intermediaries for the very good reason that if you sit down with someone face to face he’s close enough to kill you. So agreements are reached by negotation and finalized with arbitration—all with the help of third parties. “Let us sit and reason together” in out of the question.

In the midst of this conversation I heard what I thought was sirens, and considering where he is I wondered if something was up. No, he said, it’s just loud-speakers calling Muslim faithful to prayer at sundown and announcing the end of the daily Ramadan fast.

He turned his laptop and with the built-in webcam showed me the view from his window of the city, 7500 miles away, and a fort on a neighboring hill that dates back to the Ottoman Empire.

Sitting at my desk in Southern California, with a view of the Pacific Ocean it’s thrilling to think that the technology we’ve developed makes it possible for us to literally and figuratively share views. But it also makes me sad to think that there are people there and people here that are eager to kill each other, simply over differences in views thanks to accident of birth and differences in culture.

South Korea’s telecom giant KT Corp. will begin sending mothers, researchers, and office workers home or to what they call a “smart working center.”

KT will open the first smart working center at a company office in Bundang, on the outskirts of Seoul, in September. Nine other centers will open by the end of the year. By 2012 the company plans top have 30 centers nationwide.

A spokesperson said, “The adoption of the new working system is expected to help cope with the low birth rate by enabling female employees to work and raise children at the same time. It will also help save hours and costs related to commutes.”

Face to face meetings are preferred in South Korea’s business culture, so less than 1 percent of Korean’s telecommute. Security is another reasons given for the low adoption rate.

KT plans to claim a 50 per cent share of the country’s smart working market, predicted that the number of telecommuters will grow to as many as 3.5 million in 2015. The country has a population of about 49,000,000 so that would equate to a 7% adoption rate.