Before I started working as a journalist, all I knew about Apple was that I liked its stuff. They had persuaded me to spend hundreds of pounds on iPods and Macbooks, and the reason why was its equipment was quality - it still is.

Though not much has changed with the Apple 3G S - it’s an object of desire and is one of the best smartphones out there.  Then I became a tech journo, and my opinion has hardened to the company even though they are still coming out with some quality products. Why?

It’s because of its secrecy. It’s got to the point where they will say nothing unless its a press release or the device launch. The Apple Press hotline? Useless. The company might as well write a disclaimer saying “We will never say anything ever, because you smell.”

In terms of my beat my biggest issue with the ‘cult of secrecy’ is in the fact that with computer security - secrecy will probably be a very bad thing and something they won’t be able to  continue to do in the future.

As the Mac becomes more popular and increases its market share, the sooner or later they’re going to have to work with the security vendors as well as the public to make transparent what the actual threats are on a Mac device.

At the moment, nobody knows, because Apple never ever says anything about it.

But generally, the ‘cult of Apple’ works. Just seeing the look of joy when an Apple user gets a device like the new iPhone shows it does. The expectation and the hype is a proven winner.

Thing is, that’s the Apple way. It’s all about the products, and the constant expectation for new ones makes people overlook the fact they are paying more money for products which are generally less powerful.

Shame that they can’t be a little bit more transparent though. The fuss over Steve Jobs and his liver transplant at some point reached parodic levels as Apple people feared saying anything about it. A clear press statement would have probably have made the shareholders a little bit happier anyway.

I wasn’t there to see the first statements of the new Cyber Security minister Lord West, but according to reports he admitted that the government has hired a team of former “naughty boy hackers” for its new Cyber Security Operations Centre.

The BBC quotes him as saying: “You need youngsters who are deep into this stuff… If they have been slightly naughty boys, very often they really enjoy stopping other naughty boys.”

OK -  first up these are fine words for a Cyber Security Minister. Naughty boys? - I’ve only been writing on security for the last year and a half, but I already realise that many of the criminals he’s talking about aren’t ‘naughty boys’ - they are hardened criminals fully intent on making as much profit as possible.

I get the feeling he’s one of those people who don’t think that cyber criminals are ‘real’ criminals because they play on the computer. And this is somebody the government has employed to oversee its cyber security. Great.

And he’s employed hackers with criminal records? This is all well and good in a movie, but as security expert Rik Ferguson notes, the government has actually hired a team of people who have committed criminal acts and given them jobs.

He also makes the point that if you’re going to hire hackers to stop hackers, then why employ the naughty crap ones who managed top get caught? - or ’script-kiddies’ as Ferguson puts it -  the laughing stock. Yep, Lord West - good choice!

Even if this is just misquoting or taken out of context, it’s a little worrying that the Cyber Security Minister himself seems to be so inept at understanding the real problems of IT security.  Last week I wrote a feature on what the basic qualifications a Cyber Security Minister might actually need - I don’t think Lord West ticks any of the boxes.

Maybe it was the case that none of the ministers around Gordon Brown had the technological expertise or IT training for this role. In this case they really should have simply found one. I mentioned John Suffolk, government chief information officer, as somebody who had the technology knowledge for the role.

It might be the case that Neil Thompson, the prospective new director for the Office of Cyber Security, might be the person who really will shape the cyber security of Britain. As security expert Graham Cluley said in my feature, maybe its good to have an unknown person in the role who will knock heads together and do what’s needed.

But hopefully he won’t be listening to the ‘Cyber Security Minister’ Lord West. He may be all well and good when it comes to knowledge of actual physical warfare - but cyber war is a completely different beast. Hope you know what you’re doing Gordon.

If you’ve followed IT PRO for any length of time, you’ll probably know that Twitter has been suffering security wise all year.

The latest attack that became public on the weekend was first believed to be a cross-scripting worm, similar to the worm that a 17-year old managed to unleash on the Easter weekend.

However on closer inspection this isn’t all there is to it, according a post on Kapsersky’s Viruslist blog.

When clicking the link to tweets reading ‘best video’, a connection is quietly made to another server resulting in a malicious PDF being downloaded, which contains several exploits.

However, instead of a worm being downloaded with a successful exploit, a fake program will be downloaded, advertising fake anti-virus software.

The researcher couldn’t find any worm-like component, although the alert made it look like there was worm activity.

An explanation for this could simply be that the criminals behind the attack were using the stolen credentials of accounts which had been phished a week ago.

The blog said : “The attack is very significant. It would seem that at least one criminal group is now exploring the distribution of for-profit on Twitter.

“If the trends we’ve seen on other social platforms are any indicator for Twitter then we can only expect an increase in attacks.”

Twitter seems to be regularly hit with some sort of security scare, ever since January when a teenage hacker managed to take over high-profile accounts, while even celebrity twitterer Stephen Fry fell victim to a phishing attack.

We’ve also seen how a security researcher has said that Twitter’s API, used to make third party applications, is inherently flawed.

IT PRO has constantly tried to get in touch with Twitter simply to have some kind of statement, but has so far just come across a brick wall.

So what’s Biz and co gonna do? You can’t make money on something which is inherently unsafe (or can you?).

According to the NSPCC, three out of four children have since images on the ‘internet’ that have disturbed them.

The poll has renewed calls for the computer software manufacturers to make sure they install security which will stop children seeing this explicitly violent or sexual activity.

Policy advisor Zoe Hilton said:

As the medals are awarded in Beijing it looks like China are dominating all before them with a massive medal haul beating the USA into first place, with the UK doing astonishingly well this year.

However when it comes to the real competition - The Malware Olympics - it seems that the USA are beating allcomers with a massive amount of PC’s infected compared to the number two in Japan. It looks quite bad for the UK, who only get to a lowly ninth in the table.

Here’s the medal table courtesy of Trend Micro.

PC’s infected

1 USA

Seven months in working as a Staff Writer at IT PRO… What can i say? Probably the best thing to do is in what my editor does - write a list based thing about what I’ve learned.

1 Journalists always complain about pay (especially me)

2 Some IT journalists are very strange. It’s a very incestious bunch.

3 IT journalists love getting free stuff - and won’t give it back unless prompted by the PR about fifty times.

4 Once you get a reputation in IT journalism, it’s very difficult to lose it.

5

Ah the press trip. The journalist’s reward for crap pay and long hours. And how about it - I’m going to Sin City tomorrow.

I’m covering the huge EMC World Conference in Manderlay Bay, so I’ll be hearing guys like Joe Tucci talking about storage for EMC and more interestingly for me thanks to my security beat Arthur Coviello talking about the security aspects for RSA.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Asavin Wattanajantra, I