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.

More than $250,000 is offered by Microsoft to programmers who can develop new security defense for Windows OS family to protect users against attacks that exploit the software bugs. Microsoft's Blue Hat Prize announced on Wednesday at the Black Hat security conference will pay $200,000 for the best “novel runtime mitigation technology designed to prevent the exploitation of memory safety vulnerabilities.” The two runners up will receive $50,000 and a MSDN Universal subscription valued at $10,000, respectively.

A new study from Vanity Fair revealed that most Americans believe the US government should initiate cyber attacks if there is a need. 56% of the 1,045 U.S. adults polled in the 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair survey think cyber attacks are a necessary warfare tactic, with 27 percent against the idea and 17 percent saying they simply don't know.

T-Mobile USA Inc announced a new purchasing program Direct Carrier Billing to allow customers to make purchase of digital content and services from their Internet connected devices. Using Direct Carrier Billing customers of T-Mobile can charge purchases of digital games, gaming and social networking credits, music, videos and other digital content offerings directly to their existing T-Mobile account right from the Web browser using their PC, smartphone, netbook or computer tablet.

A global payments provider Elavon, wholly owned by US Bancorp, has partnered with China UnionPay to enable merchants of Elavon accept UnionPay’s debit and credit card payments in Canada with the plans to further expand into Latin America. The partnership bases Elavon’s secure, world class international processing platform to provide merchants with the benefit of a single point of service for processing, funding, settlement and reporting for all Visa®, MasterCard®, American Express®, Discover® Network and UnionPay transactions.

Google is investigated under 9 cases brought against it with the EU regulators, according to the sources with the knowledge of the matter. So far the European Commission confirmed 4 cases against Google. The new complaints will extend EU regulator’s current investigation. "The Commission has nine formal complaints now. The new complaints come from small companies," said one of the sources who declined to provide details because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Some speculations in the media say that Nokia and Microsoft may announce their new smartphone on August 17. The rumors are based on a joint invitation sent by the two companies Monday for a “party” scheduled for this date. The party will be held in Cologne, Germany. The invitation does not specify what the event will be all about. It only mentions that there will be a live act, great djs, and free grub. Still, this fact gave some feed for the speculations that the event will be crowned with the announcement of Nokia's first Windows Phone 7-based smartphone.

Mitek Systems which has long been offering its Mobile Capture imaging software to banks, is now expanding to cover the health care and insurance industries. Mitek has created a cloud-based mobile document capture service to allow health care and insurance institutions to use for receipt clearance and other back-office workflow functions.

Verizon Wireless in association with American Express are integrating Serve online payment system for the use in mobile phones and tablets. Customers may fund their Serve accounts via an existing credit or debit card or checking account, and then make purchases from a mobile device. The payment is authenticated with the user's mobile number. Besides, customers will be given a Serve card when signing up for the service. This card then can be used for in-person purchases in stores.

Google acquired The Dealmap in a move to further gain the share of a daily deals market. No terms of the deal were disclosed. Google said it was "impressed with what The Dealmap team has accomplished." "Google provides the ideal platform to help us accelerate our growth and fulfill our mission," The Dealmap said on its blog. "Joining Google will help us innovate in new and unexplored areas of commerce." The Dealmap said on Monday that its main products and services will continue "for the time being."

The UK pound slid to a 4-day low against the euro on Monday after a report showed U.K.'s manufacturing sector declined for the first time in two years in July. The sterling also depreciated against other majors. The pound slipped to a 4-day low of 0.8788 per euro and the next downside target level for the UK currency is seen at 0.880.

Gold declined more than 1% Monday after Barack Obama said lawmakers had reached a deal to cut the country's deficit, which, if approved, would remove the threat of a default on debt. The most-active U.S. gold futures fell more than 1 percent to $1,608.2, but recovered to trade down 0.9 percent at $1,616 an ounce by 0634 GMT. Spot gold fell 0.8 percent to $1,613.24, off a record high of $1,632.30 set on Friday.