On the first of the month — also the first of the year — Dana Blankenhorn published the sensationally titled The biggest threat to open source in 2009.

Malware developers are going open source in an effort to make their malicious software more useful to fraudsters. By giving criminal coders free access to malware that steals financial and personal details, the malicious software developers are hoping to expand the capabilities of old Trojans.

When I first saw this article I thought virus writers were creating malware for open source OS. However it s more like a new business model to bring more functionalities in their trojan. Interestingly, it also give the opportunity for security experts to look at it.

The recent OpenOffice worm may be a sign that malware writers are starting to target the increasingly popular open-source software, industry experts say.

Security, the experts like to tell us, is a process, not a product. With open source that can be a very good thing since when security problems are found they can be fixed quickly. That's the case over this last weekend, Feb. 9-10, when a security problem was found, and given a hot fix

Popular open source projects such as Samba, the PHP, Perl, Tcl dynamic languages, and Amanda were all found to have dozens or hundreds of security exposures.

Samba developer and open source legend Andrew Tridgell says the open source community is poor at fighting patent attacks, but says things could improve with some changes in strategy. He offered his tips for effectively fighting patent holders making claims against open source projects at the recent Linux.conf.au.

Palamida, the San Francisco company that helps companies to audit their use of open source software, has released a list of what it calls "the top five most overlooked open source vulnerabilities." To this list, Palamida has added an additional five vulnerabilities exclusively for Linux.com.

Mozilla is out this week with Firefox 3.5.9 and 3.0.19 updates, fixing multiple security vulnerabilities in the open source Web browser's two branches, while announcing that the older of the two branches is being phased out.