6. : A worm that can infect 55 models of home-based routers and DSL/cable modems has surfaced. Psyb0t seems to have originated in Australia and is the first worm that can infect home routers and modems. It runs through combinations of 6,000 common usernames and 13,000 oft-used passwords to try to get into a home system. It is helped in this by the fact that most such routers will let you try an unlimited number of times to get the right username and password, which makes us wonder what took so long for this kind of worm to crawl out of a hole.

7. : We'll just go ahead and clump the bad news together here -- the lousy economy has sparked worries that IT workers who lose their jobs will be increasingly lured to become cybercriminals. So, if your company is laying off people in the IT shop, make sure to block their access as you hand them their pink slips, security consultants said.

8. : Security researchers don't rightly know what will transpire when PCs infected by Conficker.c., the third version of the dreaded worm, starts trying to contact their controllers on April 1.

9. : Governments that are bailing out national economies, and by extension the global economy, should boost technology spending as part of their stimulus plans, an adviser to President Barack Obama's transition team said. Technology investments were key to U.S. productivity gains and other nations could also realize positive effects from boosting ICT spending, said Robert Atkinson, the founder and president of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation.

10. : We'll end on an up note -- the temperature has warmed up here in Boston and baseball season is fast approaching, so we're shedding our cold-weather recessionary blues, and it looks like some IT managers are, too. While a third of 400 IT managers surveyed in the U.S. and Europe said they expect their budgets to stay flat and half of them said that their budgets were cut (hold on, the glimmer of good is coming), 16 percent expect a spending increase this year. Not long ago, we would have been all about the bigger percentages, but in this case 16 percent sounds good, though we'll resist the temptation to round up.