New phishing attacks with data collection forms embedded directly in the electronic mails received by victims are inducing victims to send their financial details directly to the phishers via mail rather than through a specially constructed web site mimicking that of the financial institution.

The HTML emails masquerade as a security check on a PayPal account, with the subject "Validate Your Informations by Email" (sic). The message asks recipients to fill in an HTML form, which includes fields for the user's credit card details, date of birth, Social Security number and mother's maiden name. "Completing all of the checklist items will automatically restore your account access," the email advises. Clicking on "Submit to Secure Server" mails the form's contents to a free email account at Yahoo, using a CGI script hosted by a Brazilian hosting reseller at The Planet.

The web site for LinuxWorld magazine was offline for more than two hours yesterday, the latest in a series of performance problems over the last month. While many of the outages have been brief, the sites for LinuxWorld and its parent company, tech publisher Sys-Con Media, were down for more than 12 hours on June 12.

A dynamically updating chart of the availability of linuxworld.com is available here.

eBay has expanded into web hosting in a bid to retain power sellers, who increasingly are looking to expand beyond the borders of eBay's massive online marketplace. The auction giant's new ProStores service offers e-commerce hosting accounts ranging from $6.95 to $249 a month, letting merchants choose from a wide variety of features.

eBay watchers had been anticipating its move into hosting since the company's January acquisition of Kurant, a developer of e-commerce systems. eBay is using Kurant software to allow sellers to link web sites hosted at third-party providers with eBay's sales databases. "This enables an eBay seller to say 'I'd also like to have an outward-facing web site with the same back end," eBay CEO Meg Whitman said in a May 25 presentation at a Goldman Sachs conference. "You can push the same products to either store. I think it gives our sellers the ability to have a web-based storefront, in addition to an eBay storefront."

Is Yahoo selling domains for $9.95 or $4.98? That may depend on how and when you navigate to its domain sales page, as Yahoo offers periodic promotions to build interest in its web hosting offerings. On Tuesday, the yahoo.com home page featured domains for $4.98, while ads appearing on Google.com for Yahoo domains were also offering the $4.98 rate. Meanwhile, the smallbusiness.yahoo.com page was listing .com domains for $9.95 a year.

"Yahoo's standard domain price is $9.95, which is offered on our web site and channel wide 24x7," said Yahoo spokesperson Kelley Podboy. "From time to time, we use promotional pricing (e.g. $4.98) to build awareness of our services and reach new business customers in promotional channels, like Yahoo.com, where we run one-day ads several times a month. Due to the limited nature of this advertising, we hope that visitors respond right away. If they don't, they may pay our standard $9.95 price."

Yahoo isn't the only provider offering targeted discounts, as 1&1 Internet features regional pricing differences on .com domains (which are $5.99 on 1&1's U.S. site and 8.89 pounds, or $16.21, at its UK site)

Inadequate security at credit card processor CardSystems Solutions Inc. is being blamed for a break-in that has exposed more than 40 million credit card accounts to potential theft. The company says the system compromise was discovered May 22, after a MasterCard inquiry into a wave of fradulent transactions.

MasterCard International said it "worked with CardSystems to remediate the security vulnerabilities in the processor's systems. These vulnerabilities allowed an unauthorized individual to infiltrate their network and access the cardholder data." Officials at affected institutions were not specifying the vulnerability and exploit used to breach CardSystems' security. The CardSystems web site runs on the Windows 2000 operating system and Microsoft IIS Server 5.0.

CardSystems, which processes more than $15 billion in transactions a year for 105,000 small businesses, said it "immediately began a remediation process to ensure all systems were secure," the company said in a statement. "Additionally, CardSystems immediately engaged an independent 3rd party to validate systems security."