There's a new botnet in town, and this one has the potential to trump Conficker, says security firm Netwitness, which discovered the botnet. According to Netwitness, the Kneber botnet has already infected more than 74,000 macnines worldwide.

Netwitness describes Kneber as a ZeuS Trojan botnet, and more than half of the systems infected also have the Waledac Trojan, the same worm that was used to create email spam botnets assoicated with Conficker. But unlike Conficker, whose dastardly deeds have yet to be revealed, Netwitness says Kneber has been designed to target and steal login credentials and other private information.

Kneber has been found in 196 countries so far, but is most prominent in Egypt, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the U.S. It targets Windows machines, most of which include Windows XP Professional SP2, and most of which reside in corporate and government infrastructures. 

According to Netwitness, Kneber has nabbed some 68,000 login credentials in the past 4 weeks. 

Seven months ago, the New York Attorney General's office slapped both Symantec and McAfee with $375,000 in fines to settle charges that they automatically charged customers software subscription renewal fees without their consent. Symantec may have been slow to learn its lesson, because now a New York man is suing the security software maker for the same reason.

In the lawsuit, Kenneth Elan says he purchased a copy of Norton Antivirus in 2007. According to Elan, Symantec notified him in early 2009 that his software license had been automatically renewed and his credit card charged $76.03. Now Elan is taking Symantec to court, claiming the company did not abide by the above-mentioned settlement, in which Symantec and McAfee agreed to "provide electronics notification to consumers before and after renewal of the subscription."

"Prior to the automatic renewal, defendant failed to offer plaintiff an opportunity to decline to renew the license for another year," the lawsuit alleges. "If plaintiff had notice of an opportunity to decline the automatic renewal, plaintiff would not have renewed the license." 

Elan is seeking both a refund and has asked the court to grant the lawsuit class-action status.

After sitting in beta for six months, Panda today announced its Cloud Antivirus is now ready for prime time and is available as a free download for all consumers.

"Since the beta release of Panda Cloud Antivirus in April, we have been judiciously testing our cloud-based protection model, making upgrades in security and performance, and listening to our user community," said Juan Santana, CEO of Panda Security. "With Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.0, we've really changed the game, providing our users the most powerful and lightweight free protection available on the market today."

There's been a few improvements from when we first glimpsed the beta back in April, such as a polished interface, better performance thanks in large part to cache optimizations and memory management schemes, a Collective Intelligence Monitor which keeps a list of malware from the community updated in real time, and new support forums.

You can grab the free download here (and if you're a fan of the banjo, be sure to check out the video in that same link).

Many of our readers were taken off-guard when we rated Norton Internet Security 2009 a 9/Kickass in last year's antivirus roundup, and we even admit to being surprised at Norton's transformation from a resource-heavy sloth to a lean and competent antimalware package. We hope the trend continues, and we'll have a chance to see if it does now that Symatec has released beta versions of its upcoming 2010 releases to the public.

The new version features a new protection model codenamed Quorum and will put a heavier focus on reputation-based malware detection. While it won't replace existing signature-based detection for known threats, Norton says the reputation model can detect zero-day malware that's never been seen before.

"Our new approach changes the rules by both enhancing traditional security techniques to make them more aggressvie and by making it dramatically more difficult for attackers to evade detection by simply changing their malware," said Rowan Trollope, Symantec senior vice president, Consumer Business Unit.

Other features include an overhaul to parental control and spam filtering, more detailed information provided by Norton Insight, which identifies known good programs for faster scanning, and a new feature called Autopsy, which is designed to help the user understand what just happened when Norton automatically removes an infection.

Norton Internet Security 2010 Beta
Norton Antivirus 2010 Beta

Had a chance to try either one of these out? Hit the jump and let us know about it!