Security: A Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) survey found that 55 percent of respondents experienced larger numbers of spyware attacks over the last 12 months as other threats have cooled -- though the organization advised companies against becoming complacent about any types of attack. "Asked to identify the types of security attacks they expect to be most troubled by in three years time, viruses and worms (20 percent) still topped the list, followed by spyware (14 percent), wireless threats (9 percent), e-mail-borne exploits (9 percent), phishing (5 percent) and issues related to remote access (5 percent)," Matt Hines explains in this Zero Day Security entry. CompTIA also found that respondent companies "plan to increase spending across all areas related to security."

Best of the blogs: It was the peak of those glory days known as the dotcom boom. Naturally, the travel agency our Off the Record author worked for was gobbling up Mom-and-Pop shops "from Seattle to Miami." So they sent him up to evaluate a recently acquired one in Seattle that boasted a supposedly superior IT guy, Eric. "This was a true IT operation," and Eric "took time to give me specifics on the networking setups, spanning tree-enabled or not, and their redundant setups. He also described each server and its function," enough to impress. Until our author suggested sliding an NT4 box into the bottom rung of a rack, to which Eric laughed, snickering that would make the e-mail slow, really slow. "See, data flows faster downhill. You should always put servers at the top of a rack with switches below." Eric wouldn't budge on this, either. No joke. A call to the team leader later, and Eric was out. "We unearthed thousands of problems (virus, file corruption, and so on) and a nice stash of porn on those Windows 95 servers as we converted them."

The news beat: Dell targets the enterprise with new multi-core workstations that also feature multithreading capabilities. Microsoft thus far won't confirm a proxy configuration flaw, discovered by a hacker, that appears to exploit an eight-year old hole in Windows. The One Laptop Per Child program gets slapped with a lawsuit by a Massachusetts company, Lagos Analysis, claiming patent infringement. And, according to a new report from the Ponemon Institute, the cost of data breaches keeps rising.

Posted by Tom Sullivan on November 28, 2007 10:35 AM