In ecommerce and money news

A social networking giant Facebook has purchase a digital book publisher Push Pop for an undisclosed amount of money. The ebook publisher was co-founded by an ex-Apple employee Mike Matas, who designed UIs and artwork for the company's Mac OS X, iPhone and iPad products. "Now we're taking our publishing technology and everything we've learned and are setting off to help design the world's largest book, Facebook," said the company in a statement on its website.

An online security firm F-Secure revealed that botnets of compromised machines are now used by cyber criminals to issue units of Bitcoin virtual currency. Perpetrators used the ideas in distributed computing practiced by the SETI project. Cyber criminals programmed their botnets of zombie machines to farm Bitcoins. "The bots are created with a generator," writes Mikko H Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure. "Generator sets a specific Twitter account to be the one which can be used to control the mining botnet."

South Korean police reported Thursday that over 30 North Korean hackers were recruited to work in China by a South Korean criminal ring. The hackers stole personal data of South Korean gamers and transferred $5 million to North Korea. Seoul blamed North Korea for distributing malicious software to paralyze web sites of government agencies and businesses as well as orchestrating a cyber attack on a South Korean bank this year that brought down its network.