Intel, the largest semiconductor chip maker in the world, purchased the security company McAfee earlier today for $7.68 billion, or $48 per share, in cash. McAfee will continue to operate on its own, as a subsidiary, and will report to the Software and Services Group of Intel.

The “acquisition enables a combination of security software and hardware from one company to ultimately better protect consumers, corporations and governments as billions of devices – and the server and cloud networks that manage them – go online,” Intel said in the press release.

Acquiring McAfee is just another step in Intel’s game-plan, as Intel describes the McAfee purchase as the “third pillar of what people demand from all computing experiences.” Intel also recently purchased Texas Instrument’s cable modem line for an undisclosed amount.

Intel’s goal is to provide products that are necessary for consumer electronic devices such as digital televisions, Blu-Ray disc players, and set top boxes like DVRs.

Possibly in response to Craig Heffner’s presentation at Black Hat 2010, Verizon is apparently changing its users’ router passwords if the password, itself, is still set as the default given by Verizon.

A Slashdot user wrote, “I received an email from Verizon that said ‘we have identified that your router still had a password of either password1 or admin1 and we have changed it to your serial number’.” The user also noted that he had a mysterious 4567 port connected to his router, labeled ‘Verizon FIOS Service’, which could possibly be the port Verizon uses when accessing its customer’s routers.

In July, Craig Heffner, a Maryland-based security researcher, presented a software exploit that could be used on most home routers. The exploit, which is a variation of the term known as “DNS rebinding”, creates a website that lists a visitor’s own IP address instead of the phishing scheme’s IP address. According to Forbes, a script on the website then converts the website’s IP address to the visitor’s own IP address, and gains access to that user’s router settings and other information.

A representative for Verizon could not be immediately reached for comment.

In the Barracuda Labs 2010 midyear security report, Google was shown to give twice as much malware than Microsoft’s Bing, Google.com, and Yahoo! combined.

The report was taken during a two month period with analysis reviews over 5.5 million search results and 25,000 trending topics on Twitter. The purpose, as reported Net-Security, was to “analyze trending topics on popular search engines to understand the scope of the problem and to identify the types of topics used by malware distributors.”

In the report, which you can view here, Google distributes the most malware with 69 percent over Yahoo!’s 18 percent, Bing’s 12 percent, and Twitter’s 1 percent.

More than 25 million Twitter accounts were analyzed to measure account behavior on Twitter to model normal user behavior and find features that are strong indicators of malicious account use. The three key areas for Barracuda Labs review are:  Twitter Crime Rate, True Twitter Users, and Tweet Number.

The report found that as Twitter activity increases, the more tweets that are being written, and casual users are being more active. As the casual users increases, so does the malicious activity. Half of Twitter users tweet less than once a day, with one and then users tweeting five or more times daily, with 30 percent of Twitter accounts being deserted accounts. Almost half of Twitter users only follow five or less accounts, and only one of ten are following over 100 people.

Google Inc. is celebrating its sixth month in the Chromium Security Rewards program, and the search engine is increasing its maximum reward to $3, 133.70 for the program’s  SecSeverity-Critical bugs. For less serious bugs, the reward remains at $500 with the possibility of an increase for high-level bug reports. “Factors indicating a high-quality bug report might include a careful test case reduction, an accurate analysis of root cause, or productive discussion towards resolution.”

This increase in pay comes days after Mozilla upped its bug bounty reward to $3,000 for Firefox, Thunderbird, and Firefox Mobile.

Mozilla’s revamped Security Bug Bounty program is nothing new; in fact, it has been around since 2004. The program offers a cash reward for each and every legitimate security bug that is submitted. The non-profit foundation behind the Firefox browser is now offering $3,000 for each and every submission.

As GeekSmack reported, the foundation isn’t looking for just any security flaws, however, it is looking for original, replicable flaws that could seriously give leeway to user’s private information. Or as Mozilla puts it, flaws “that allow execution of arbitrary code on users’ systems“.

Either way, if you have the appropriate knowledge, it sounds like a great way to work from home.