Top-level employees of publicly listed companies are being targeted by cybercriminals using malware-infected RTF documents disguised as recruitment letters.

Security company MessageLabs reported that 1,100 e-mails containing malware-infected RTF (rich text file) attachments were recorded over a 16-hour period this month. Four separate waves appeared between September 13 and 14, the company said.

“All (the e-mails) were going after (top-level) management. The e-mails included the company name in the subject field, purporting to be a recruitment company. What it had in the attachment is an executable RTF file,” a MessageLabs representative said.

Similar e-mails were noticed in June, the representative said.

The e-mail, which contains no body text, includes a .scr screen-saver dummy file within an executable RTF file, the representative said. When recipients attempt to open the file, a message is displayed stating: “Microsoft has encountered an error and had to close.” The recipient is then advised: “To view this, double click on the message.”

Once activated, the RTF file starts a chain of downloads that establish a secure connection between the attacker’s server and the infected computer.

The top-level nature of the targets clearly indicates that the attackers are after information, the MessageLabs representative said, but the greater concern is the social-engineering technique used to spread the Trojan-harboring e-mail.

The Pirate Bay has filed a criminal complaint against entertainment firms over alleged attacks against the controversial file sharing tracker site.

A police complaint against the Swedish subsidiaries of music and movie studios follows a leak of embarassing emails from MediaDefender, the firm allegedly hired by media moguls to disrupt Pirate Bay’s operations.

These attacks included “infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking, and spamming”, Pirate Bay alleges.

Internal mails from MediaDefender detailing, among others, plans to pollute file sharing networks and to set up fake file sharing sites in a bid to infect users with spyware, ironically appeared on file sharing networks earlier this month.

Amazon.com Inc launched an early version of its highly anticipated digital music download store, which is seen as a potential rival to Apple Inc’s dominant iTunes system.

Amazon’s store, named “Amazon MP3,” allows users to buy music without copy protection technology, so that the songs can play on a variety of devices including Apple’s iPod.

Most songs are priced from 89 cents to 99 cents, with more than half of the 2 million songs priced at 89 cents, the online retailer said in a statement.

Setting the stage for a possible bidding battle, Microsoft Corp. is mulling an investment in Facebook Inc. that would value the rapidly growing online hangout at $10 billion or more, according to a report published Monday.

Citing unnamed people familiar with the matter, The Wall Street Journal said Microsoft is holding preliminary discussions that could culminate in a $300 million to $500 million investment in Facebook, a Palo Alto social-networking site founded just 3 1/2 years ago.

In exchange for the money, Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft would receive up to a 5 percent stake in privately held Facebook, which has previously raised nearly $41 million from venture capitalists and other individual investors.

A pro-business think tank in Europe has recommended unbundling Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system from sales of new PCs in order to give customers more choice when buying a new computer.

A report from the Globalisation Institute in Brussels urges the European Commission to require that PCs and operating systems be sold separately in Europe to break Microsoft’s monopoly in the desktop OS market.

“Microsoft’s dominant position is not in the public interest. It limits the market and has slowed technical development to the prejudice of consumers,” said the report.

The report is gaining attention partly because the Globalisation Institute usually advocates a hands-off approach to business regulation. It researches and develops policy options that are sometimes championed by politicians

In what must be one of the speediest copyright-infringement cases on record, Monsoon Multimedia has admitted to violating the GNU General Public License (GPL) and is entering settlement negotiations.

On September 20, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) announced it was suing Monsoon on behalf of the BusyBox project — the first U.S. suit involving GPL version 2. The suit claimed that Monsoon had violated the GPL by including BusyBox’s software in its product, release under a proprietary license.

The company said it will comply with the open-source requirements and make its modifications to the BusyBox source code available on its Web site within several weeks.

“Since we intend to and always intended to comply with all open-source software license requirements, we are confident that the matter will be quickly resolved,” Graham Radstone, chairman and COO at Monsoon Multimedia, said in a statement.

Check Point has released a beta of yet another sandbox for your Internet browser. Called ZoneAlarm ForceField, the idea is simple: What happens in Firefox, stays in Firefox. Or Internet Explorer, for that matter. Any downloads or collateral material you collect during your browsing experience is destroyed once you close the browser. If beta testing goes well, Check Point plans to release ZoneAlarm ForceField in the first quarter of 2008 as a retail product.

If ZoneAlarm ForceField sounds like Google’s recent purchase, GreenBorder, it is–kind of. ZoneAlarm ForceField goes beyond GreenBorder by offering antispyware and antiphishing–both drawing from ZoneAlarm’s own technologies.

Microsoft Corp. said it will release three versions of its Office 2008 for Mac suite in January, with the most expensive of the bunch aimed at creative professionals overwhelmed by the task of organizing their digital media files.

Office 2008 for Mac Home and Student Edition, which includes three licenses for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage, an e-mail/calendar/contacts program, will cost $150, Microsoft said.

A $400 version aimed at professionals who use Apple Inc. computers, simply called Office 2008 for Mac, includes the same programs as Home and Student, plus the ability to connect to a Windows Exchange server.

A third version, the $500 Special Media Edition, adds features to the $400 configuration, including Expression Media, a program that helps computer users organize and manipulate digital photos, video and other files.

Microsoft sells Expression Media, one of several new tools for graphic designers and other creative professionals, for $299.

All three versions work on Intel-based Macs and older PowerPC machines. The software maker planned to announce the lineup and pricing Tuesday at Apple Expo in Paris, France.

Google Inc is considering a Canadian launch of its Street View map feature, which offers street-level close-ups of city centers, but would blur people’s faces and vehicle license plates to respect tougher Canadian privacy laws, the Web search firm said on Monday.

Canada’s privacy commissioner told Google in August that the feature — which offers a series of panoramic, 360-degree images of nine U.S. cities — could violate Canadian laws if it were introduced without alterations.

Some of the pictures feature people who can clearly be identified, which contravenes Canadian legislation on privacy.

IPhone owners who have unlocked their handsets so they could use carriers other than AT&T Inc. may end up with a phone that doesn’t work after the company’s next software update, Apple Inc. warned Monday.

Since the iPhone debuted in June, hackers have posted a number of methods online to make it possible to use the iPhone on cellular networks other than AT&T, which is the exclusive official carrier for the iPhone.

Apple executives say they have discovered that many of those unauthorized unlocking programs cause some software damage to iPhones.

Now, a software update that Apple plans to issue later this week that will add features such as accessibility to the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store may end up making the touch-screen cell phone completely inoperable if it has been hacked into.

“This has nothing to do with proactively disabling a phone that is unlocked or hacked,” Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, said in an interview. “It’s unfortunate that some of these programs have caused damage to the iPhone software, but Apple cannot be responsible for … those consequences.”