Ubuntu.com was unavailable for some short periods during yesterday's release of Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala":

The 9.10 versions of Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, Mythbuntu, and Ubuntu Studio were also released at the same time.

The Ubuntu.com website is itself powered by an Ubuntu server running Apache 2.2.8. Netcraft's October Web Server Survey found a total of 1.4 million websites being served from known Ubuntu machines, nearly all of which were running the open source Apache web server.

The White House launched a new version of its website on Saturday. While little has changed on the surface, the underlying technology is now powered by the open source Drupal content management system.

The www.whitehouse.gov site was previously served by Microsoft IIS 6.0, but the new server software identifies itself as "White House". The new site continues to use Akamai's content delivery network for caching.

Drupal is the 6th largest PHP-based content management system in Netcraft's Web Server Survey, being found on more than 400,000 websites. Drupal's security will no doubt be put to the test in the coming weeks, as the White House website has always stood as an obvious target for hackers. Drupal's security team has a full disclosure policy of announcing security problems after they have been fixed, rather than withholding the information from its users.

Drupal's core security advisories are made public at http://drupal.org/security. Eight advisories have been published so far this year, which have included two highly critical file inclusion flaws which could have allowed remote attackers to execute code on Windows servers.

American financial services company Citigroup suffered a deluge of phishing attacks after Monday's news that it intended to acquire the banking operations of Wachovia Corporation.

The credit crisis has triggered a number of acquisitions in recent months, and fraudsters have previously tried to exploit such events by orchestrating phishing attacks against the acquiring companies. One motivation for these types of attack is the increased chance of success when potential victims have less familiarity with the genuine website that is being fraudulently mimicked.

However, the timing of this week's attacks may be coincidental — and subsequently Wachovia has announced that it will instead merge with Wells Fargo.

Netcraft offers a countermeasures service to help banks and other financial organizations take down phishing sites. This service complements Netcraft's Phishing, Identity Theft and Bank Fraud Detection service and its free Anti-Phishing Toolbar.

MySpace has become one of the first very busy sites to adopt the use of Windows Server 2008, using the new Microsoft operating system on its redirection site at msplinks.com.

MySpace started using the msplinks.com site last year, in a bid to protect its users against spamming and phishing attacks. When users added a link into MySpace, the URL would be replaced with a link to msplinks.com, which would then redirect to the intended URL. This gave MySpace greater control over the links that originated from their site, allowing them to disable the links if they are found to point to spam, viruses or phishing sites.

MySpace initially received criticism for implementing their redirection system, as it resulted in all destination URLs being converted to lowercase. For some users, this broke links to popular sites such as YouTube, which uses case-sensitive URLs for its videos (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBGIQ7ZuuiU).

While the msplinks.com server exhibits the TCP/IP characteristics of Windows Server 2008, and runs Microsoft's IIS 7.0 web server software, the main MySpace site at myspace.com continues to use IIS 6.0 and Windows Server 2003. Netcraft's Web Server Survey contains more than 8 million sites hosted by myspace.com.

'Msplinks' that are no longer in service cause the user to be redirected to a MySpace error page, which states that, "...the link was very naughty, and, much like head lice, had to be eliminated before it spread." The page then goes on to describe the possible reasons for the link being disabled.

A casual glance at the msplinks.com homepage reveals a distinct lack of content; however, the purpose of the site is contained in a hidden message written in white text, which can be viewed by highlighting the contents of the page, or viewing the HTML source: