The nightmare began in August with Blaster, a new kind of virus, which infected computers through their Internet connections, without e-mails or attachments, replicated on its own, and may have played a role in the recent blackout in the U.S. Northeast. A week later, things got worse: the sixth version of SoBig,a virus more sophisticated and cunning each time it appeared, was programming innocentcomputers to an unknown sinister end. In Finland, Michael Shnayerson learns how a ponytailed virus hunter, Mikko Hypponen, raced to defuse the threat—and how lethal these cyber-plagues can be.
Read More
Signed by the artist, certified by his estate—it's got to be an original Andy Warhol, right? Not unless the Warhol authentication board says so. But dealers and collectors are crying foul over the four-member board's perplexing verdicts, which have turned high-priced art into wall decoration
Read More
Department of the Interior employees are horrified by how Secretary Gale Norton and her powerful deputy, J. Steven Griles, have allowed industry to exploit America’s wilderness. Probing stealthy bureaucratic maneuvers and Griles’s ties to coal, oil, and gas, the author finds a massive, irreversible landgrab.
Read More
Rising on one of the last big fields in the Hamptons is a 100,000-square-foot limestone villa complex that may be the largest new home in America. Just who is the man building it—Ira Rennert—and why does he want a compound that’s more than twice the size of Bill Gates’s?
Read More