A plane crash that killed 154 people in 2008 might have been partly connected to the infection of an important ground safety system by malware, a Spanish newspaper has claimed.

The Spanair plane took off from Madrid to fly to the Canary Islands on 20 August 2008, but failed to clear the runway. Of the 172 passengers and aircrew on board, only 18 survived.

The precise cause of the crash remains contentious but was believed by investigators to relate to the MD-82 not having its flaps set to the correct position prior to takeoff.

Computerworld - About 40 different Windows applications contain a critical flaw that can be used by attackers to hijack PCs and infect them with malware, a security researcher said Wednesday.

The bug was patched by Apple in its iTunes software for Windows four months ago, but remains in more than three dozen other Windows programs, said HD Moore, chief security officer at Rapid7 and creator of the open-source Metasploit penetration-testing toolkit. Moore did not reveal the names of the vulnerable applications or their makers, however.