InfoWorld Security

IBM is the second company in two days to suggest that the number of computers infected by the Conficker.C worm may be higher than previously thought.

Microsoft warned Thursday that hackers are actively exploiting a software vulnerability in PowerPoint, the company#39;s presentation application.

The high-stakes, but still under-the covers battle by IBM to take over Sun Microsystems is still in play, but IBM may be rethinking what it is willing to pay for the enterprise vendor.

Two U.S. senators are proposing legislation that would give federal officials significant new authority to create and enforce data security standards both for government agencies and key parts of the private sector.

The Conficker worm may have infected more machines than previously thought, according to Internet infrastructure provider OpenDNS.

Forrester Research is now predicting that U.S. IT spending will drop by 3.1 percent this year, shattering its previous projection of a 1.6 percent increase.

An expected activation of the Conficker.c worm at midnight on April 1 passed without incident, despite sensationalized fears that the Internet itself might be affected, but security researchers said users aren#39;t out of the woods yet.

Global IT spending is expected to decline nearly 4 percent#160;in 2009 over the previous year as industry watchers confirm the current recession will see more losses than the dot-com bust in 2001, Gartner reports.

China on Tuesday denied suggestions it could be involved in a cyberespionage ring that attacked computers worldwide from servers mostly based in the country.

Google#39;s search rankings are being stuffed with links to fake security software that purports to remove Conficker, a widespread worm that#39;s currently the Internet#39;s No. 1 security threat, but doesn#39;t.

Will the Conficker worm, expected to activate on April 1, set off viral destruction or be a dud?br clear=both style=clear: both;/ br clear=both style=clear: both;/ a href=http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=0a963fd3190ae05b20dbbae89be162e3p=1img alt= style=border: 0; border=0 src=http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=0a963fd3190ae05b20dbbae89be162e3p=1//a

2008 was the busiest year yet for online fraudsters, according to an annual Internet Crime Report released Monday by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.br clear=both style=clear: both;/ br clear=both style=clear: both;/ a href=http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=778fc36ca551c83fceff3d28e4d957f4p=1img alt= style=border: 0; border=0 src=http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=778fc36ca551c83fceff3d28e4d957f4p=1//a

Storage start-up ParaScale is heading into general availability with software that aggregates disk storage on standard Linux servers to create pools of storage that can be used by cloud services providers and to build private clouds.br clear=both style=clear: both;/ br clear=both style=clear: both;/ a href=http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=baa045b8a12562705cf68092ae1451b5p=1img alt= style=border: 0; border=0 src=http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=baa045b8a12562705cf68092ae1451b5p=1//a

GPS navigation device vendor TomTom has agreed to pay Microsoft to settle patent-infringement cases the companies filed against each other in the last five weeks, but Microsoft will not pay fees to TomTom.br clear=both style=clear: both;/ br clear=both style=clear: both;/ a href=http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=b1e6aae871c1bafc4268d787e991449dp=1img alt= style=border: 0; border=0 src=http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=b1e6aae871c1bafc4268d787e991449dp=1//a

The much-discussed quot;Open Cloud Manifesto,quot; signed by dozens of vendors in support of cloud-computing interoperability, was officially released on Monday following several days of discussion in the tech media and the blogosphere last week.br clear=both style=clear: both;/ br clear=both style=clear: both;/ a href=http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=653ce743a73b22b4cdd1485ab671dfc6p=1img alt= style=border: 0; border=0 src=http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=653ce743a73b22b4cdd1485ab671dfc6p=1//a

The credit card details of 19,000 Brits that shopped online were freely available on Google, it has been revealed.br clear=both style=clear: both;/ br clear=both style=clear: both;/ hr / div style=font-size:xx-small;color:gray;padding-bottom:.5emPresented By:/div diva href=http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/ht.php?t=camp;i=fb4e71c0427a85893a462e95168966efamp;p=1Inside Guantanamo: Sunday at 9P e/p/a/div table border=0 cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 trtd valign=topembed src=http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/17831997001?isVid=1publisherID=1660622131 bgcolor=#FFFFFF flashVars=@videoPlayer=17854499001playerID=17831997001domain=embed base=http://admin.brightcove.com name=flashObj width=300 height=250 seamlesstabbing=false type=application/x-shockwave-flash allowFullScreen=true swLiveConnect=true allowScriptAccess=always pluginspage=http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash/embedbr /br /img src=http://images.pheedo.com/g/ngc_bluewhale/brand_logo_80x60.pngbr /font size=2 face=tahoma Guantanamo Bay is one of the world's controversial prisons. This may be its final chapter. With unprecedented access, National Geographic has the story you haven't heard. Both sides, told from the inside, before its doors close forever. Click to learn more and go Inside Guantanamo br //fonta href=http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?a=v3%3Aa271cee67dfff482f0d65fb1ab2dbeb4%3AMr%2Bh0MpnVRLPNJdcAt9CNC9V4bldEKN7LJct7xOR4Qasw2TqiPSywbekHkNSMJBXoLLTgxjqJ6GFDjQrWKxDTti%2BExxPSgB53ImQxT%2Fv%2F65baGhOO2fHMoDRL2wRGFtyEd9rjTRarteEV4MpZVASTMH%2BQlzbT04u%2FQ%3D%3Dtarget=_blankfont size=2 font color=007DC3 face=tahoma Unatgeotv.com/guantanamoU/font/a/td/tr trtdnbsp;/td/tr /table div style=font-size:xx-small; padding-top: 1em;span style=border-top: 1px solid br style=display:none/ a href=http://www.pheedo.com/Ads by Pheedo/a /spanimg alt= style=border: 0; height: 1px; width: 1px; border=0 height=1 width=1 src=http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/ht.php?t=vamp;i=fb4e71c0427a85893a462e95168966efamp;p=1/ br/ /div

Just days after a hacker released code that could be used to attack the Firefox browser, Mozilla developers have a fix.br clear=both style=clear: both;/ br clear=both style=clear: both;/ a href=http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=a3f225c6a5a723bb0e8240453c9dbf66p=1img alt= style=border: 0; border=0 src=http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=a3f225c6a5a723bb0e8240453c9dbf66p=1//a

The high-profile disclosure over the weekend of the GhostNet cyberespionage ring that targeted 1,295 computers in more than 100 countries underscores how highly targeted and sophisticated attacks, often run by criminals, are changing the security landscape, according to a security researcher at Symantec.br clear=both style=clear: both;/ br clear=both style=clear: both;/ a href=http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=1e67d6f03018612ace6a12555f7ae4fbp=1img alt= style=border: 0; border=0 src=http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=1e67d6f03018612ace6a12555f7ae4fbp=1//a

Google Docs users shouldn#39;t lose sleep over the security concerns a security analyst has raised about the hosted suite of office productivity applications, Google said late Friday.br clear=both style=clear: both;/ br clear=both style=clear: both;/ hr / div style=font-size:xx-small;color:gray;padding-bottom:.5emPresented By:/div diva href=http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/ht.php?t=camp;i=48b5ec4a385e98ffa4a1854aad2eacd4amp;p=1Inside Guantanamo: Sunday at 9P e/p/a/div table border=0 cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 trtd valign=topembed src=http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/17831997001?isVid=1publisherID=1660622131 bgcolor=#FFFFFF flashVars=@videoPlayer=17854499001playerID=17831997001domain=embed base=http://admin.brightcove.com name=flashObj width=300 height=250 seamlesstabbing=false type=application/x-shockwave-flash allowFullScreen=true swLiveConnect=true allowScriptAccess=always pluginspage=http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash/embedbr /br /img src=http://images.pheedo.com/g/ngc_bluewhale/brand_logo_80x60.pngbr /font size=2 face=tahoma Guantanamo Bay is one of the world's controversial prisons. This may be its final chapter. With unprecedented access, National Geographic has the story you haven't heard. Both sides, told from the inside, before its doors close forever. Click to learn more and go Inside Guantanamo br //fonta href=http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?a=v3%3Aa271cee67dfff482f0d65fb1ab2dbeb4%3AMr%2Bh0MpnVRLPNJdcAt9CNC9V4bldEKN7LJct7xOR4Qasw2TqiPSywbekHkNSMJBXoLLTgxjqJ6GFDjQrWKxDTti%2BExxPSgB53ImQxT%2Fv%2F65baGhOO2fHMoDRL2wRGFtyEd9rjTRarteEV4MpZVASTMH%2BQlzbT04u%2FQ%3D%3Dtarget=_blankfont size=2 font color=007DC3 face=tahoma Unatgeotv.com/guantanamoU/font/a/td/tr trtdnbsp;/td/tr /table div style=font-size:xx-small; padding-top: 1em;span style=border-top: 1px solid br style=display:none/ a href=http://www.pheedo.com/Ads by Pheedo/a /spanimg alt= style=border: 0; height: 1px; width: 1px; border=0 height=1 width=1 src=http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/ht.php?t=vamp;i=48b5ec4a385e98ffa4a1854aad2eacd4amp;p=1/ br/ /div

A 10-month cyberespionage investigation has found that 1,295 computers in 103 countries and belonging to international institutions have been spied on, with some circumstantial evidence suggesting China may be to blame.br clear=both style=clear: both;/ br clear=both style=clear: both;/ a href=http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=8c4f6394fabf7c0f1e426d9e09a95aadp=1img alt= style=border: 0; border=0 src=http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=8c4f6394fabf7c0f1e426d9e09a95aadp=1//a