An Austrian security vendor has found a vulnerability in Windows Vista that it says could possibly allow an attacker to run unauthorized code on a PC.

On Nov. 6, Sam Palmisano, chairman, president & CEO of IBM, made an important speech entitled "The Smart Planet: The Next Leadership Agenda" at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York City. That speech is only now getting public press attention.

How much is spam costing your company? Google unveiled a nifty little calculator Wednesday to help you add it up.

Two years after trying to build a consumer anti-virus business, Microsoft has decided to throw in the towel.

A U.S. court has ordered a software company to stop selling a program that secretly records keystrokes on a person's PC, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said Monday.

NetWitness, a vendor of networking threat-analysis software, is offering a free version of its NetWitness Investigator package by download, the company said Monday.

The dramatic fall in spam traffic reported last week after alleged rogue ISP McColo was taken offline will only be a temporary reprieve and could actually generate a new wave of Trojans, experts have warned.

Management technology will allow virtualization to achieve its full potential, according to CA CEO John Swainson during his keynote at CA World 2008 (PDF) on Sunday.

Veritas has launched a service aimed at helping companies get more out of their datacenter investments by checking for problems and advising on ways to fix them.

Acquire 35 companies in five years, and you will quickly see the need to reduce the cost of communication across your entire organization.

For Morgan Keegan, the dire events of Sept. 11 drove home the importance of resiliency in advance of disaster. Inspired by those who rallied toward recovery in the immediate aftermath, and aware of the importance of operational continuity in the financial services sector, the regional investment firm began its project to build greater reliability into its systems the very next day.

Start to finish, the week was full of news related to the sorry state of the global economy, with Sun capping things off by announcing it will cut thousands of jobs. Casting a little hopeful light on yet another week of dismal news was optimism from IT professionals who say that, unlike with previous downturns, they aren't being ordered to make drastic cuts. In somewhat brighter news, AMD launched its Shanghai quad-core Opteron chip, Citrix is bringing its XenApps and XenDesktop software to the iPhone, and Microsoft has released an updated, less-restricted API for its Live Search.

Mozilla on Wednesday patched 11 vulnerabilities in Firefox 3.0 -- and 12 bugs in the older Firefox 2.0 -- that could be used to compromise computers and steal information.

Microsoft today called its first month of predicting whether hackers will create exploit code for its bugs a success -- even though the company got its forecast right less than half the time.

Some security patches take time. Seven-and-a-half years, in fact, if you count the time it's taken Microsoft to patch a security issue in its SMB (Server Message Block) service, fixed Tuesday. This software is used by Windows to share files and print documents over a network.

The financial meltdown, fueled by a decade of exotic financing mechanisms that some say were designed to hide risk and pass it on to unwary buyers, will have a major impact on IT budgets, personnel, and reporting responsibilities. New regulations will put IT in the hot seat, much as the post-Enron Sarbanes-Oxley and other such rules did in the early 2000s as governments responded to that period's financial shenanigans.

Microsoft released two security updates for its Windows operating system Tuesday to patch flaws that could give attackers new ways to install malicious software on a victim's computer.

A flawed signature update to AVG Technologies ' antivirus software over the weekend crippled some Windows XP PCs by mistakenly deleting a critical system file, the company has confirmed.

Years of in-fighting over the DNSSEC standard have left Internet users unnecessarily exposed to malware.

SpringSource has bought G2One, which provides training and support for the increasingly popular open-source Groovy language and the related Web application development framework Grails. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Computer systems that run the world's critical infrastructure are not as secure as they should be and insiders are mad.

More than 10 percent of the Internet's DNS servers are still vulnerable to cache-poisoning attacks, according to a worldwide survey of public-facing Internet nameservers.

Hackers have launched a massive Web hacking campaign, putting malicious links on as many as 10,000 servers, security vendor Kaspersky Lab warned Friday.

For the second time in two days, Adobe Systems has warned users of multiple vulnerabilities in one of its most-popular programs and issued a security update to plug the holes.

Microsoft Thursday said it will release only two security updates on Tuesday -- down from the 11 issued in October's mammoth Patch Tuesday -- to fix bugs in Windows and Office.

Anti-virus developer SMobile released software this week to protect users of the G1 Android phone, although one security analyst wondered if people really need it.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has decided to seek more comment on proposed changes to two programs, the Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation, that have been controversial for years.

Security researchers say they've developed a way to partially crack the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption standard used to protect data on many wireless networks.

Many organizations are embracing SOA as a way to increase application flexibility, make integration more manageable, lower development costs, and better align technology systems to business processes. The appeal of SOA is that it divides an organization's IT infrastructure into services, each of which implements a business process consumable by users and services.

Hackers have found a way to circumvent controls in the Google Android operating system used on T-Mobile's G1 mobile phone, allowing them to get around restrictions created by the phone's designers.

Barack Obama wasn't the only big winner in the United States on Election Day. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission's decision late Tuesday to allow new kinds of broadband devices to operate in unused television spectrum will reinvigorate the U.S. tech industry and provide a new broadband option for customers, supporters said.

The U.S. Department of Justice was planning to block Google's proposed advertising deal with Yahoo, leading to Google's announcement Wednesday that it was backing out, according to Yahoo.

Customers trying to claim deposits from a collapsed Icelandic bank could be at a higher risk over the next few weeks of falling victim to phishing scams, according to security analysts.

A worm that exploits the bug Microsoft patched in an emergency update 11 days ago is actively attacking systems, several security companies and researchers said Monday.

On Sunday, Sprint Nextel reconnected its network with Cogent Communications after severing it earlier last week. The reconnection is only temporary, as the core issues in this dispute have not changed, Sprint said in a statement to its customers.

Microsoft's latest security report shows that the number of new vulnerabilities found in its software was lower in first half of the year than the last half of 2007, with the Windows Vista OS proving more resistant to exploits than XP.

Voting machines of all stripes have remarkably similar flaws and though geographically scattered, inaccurate tallies of votes are not likely to flip a whole presidential election, there is a "nightmare scenario" that could. Meanwhile on the state level, security issues have already popped up in the wake of various states' deployments of direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines.

Pamela Smith, a longtime critic of electronic voting machines, is worried more about long lines on Tuesday, election day in the U.S.

Microsoft's PDC was the source of the biggest news this week as the copany unveiled its Windows Azure cloud-computing platform. The company also let out some more details about the forthcoming Windows 7 OS and talked up its ambitions with Silverlight. Meanwhile, Google proposed settling lawsuits related to its book-scanning and indexing project, and word also seeped out through the Wall Street Journal that the company's search advertising deal with Yahoo could be scrapped because of regulatory issues.

As the U.S. Department of Justice prolongs its review of their search advertising deal, Google and Yahoo lean further toward scrapping their plans, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

Sprint-Nextel has decided to sever its Internet connection with Cogent, another ISP, according to a statement from Cogent.

The U.S. Department of Justice will require Verizon to sell some wireless telecommunications assets in 22 states in order to wrap up its $28 billion acquisition of wireless carrier Alltel, the DOJ said Thursday.

OpenOffice.org has released two patches that repair older versions of its open source office productivity suite.

WabiSabiLabi may shut down its online marketplace for security vulnerabilities, focusing instead on the line of OneShield unified threat management (UTM) appliances it developed with Italian defense company EuroTech.

A malicious program that sprang up on Facebook.com in late July has surfaced again, this time using Google's Web sites to sneak around security filters.

The malware armies are growing, with a sharp rise in the number of computers corralled into botnets -- far-flung networks of infected PCs that digital crooks use to steal financial account data, relay spam, and launch crippling Internet attacks. Now that popular Web sites can invisibly and unwillingly spread malicious software, the days of staying safe just by being careful where you surf are sadly long gone. But you can take steps to protect yourself and your PC from these threats.

Google has settled lawsuits brought against it by major publishers and authors that argued that Google's wholesale scanning and indexing of in-copyright books without permission amounted to massive copyright violations.

Enterprises are stepping up efforts to counter spying operations that aim to steal their trade secrets, according to a former U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who now works for Xerox.

Social networking service Twitter could be used by terrorists as a tool in planning attacks, the U.S. military claims.

Search engines such as Google are increasingly being used by hackers against Web applications that hold sensitive data, according to a security expert.