The fact that e-crime is no longer a hobby but a profession has been repeated so often now that it no longer makes for attention-grabbing headlines. But it's always interesting to see what the crims are up to next. Accodring to Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CTO of web security firm Finjan, the apeing of traditional business models in the shady world of e-crime continues apace. Finjan researchers have uncovered instances of affiliate marketing-style operations, where webmasters are encouraged to embed Trojans or other malicious code on their site and are paid per click-through, or poor unfortunate who might land on that site. Nice.

More research from the firm uncovered the use of Ajax, that darling technology of the Web 2.0 world, in order to obfuscate the downloading and execution of malware fom a remote server. Because the technology enables requests to be made to remote servers without the need for any visual change to the user's screen, or need to click on any elements, it can all be done behind the scenes. This means that just by visiting a page, your PC could be infected. Right, that's enough security talk for one week. Next week, back to the Hoff.