Led by strong performance in its software business, IBM posted second-quarter profits up 9 percent from last year. The company earned US$2 billion in the quarter that ended June 30, compared to $1.9 billion in the second quarter of 2005. Per-share earnings were $1.30, which marked a 14 percent increase over $1.14 last year.

Hackers are striking databases in record numbers, trying to pilfer a rich trove of personal and financial data, a security vendor said Wednesday. SecureWorks, based in Atlanta, is detecting up to 8,000 attacks per day on databases owned by its clients, up from an average 100 to 200 attacks per day in the first three months of this year. The statistics come from data on its 1,300 clients, including financial institutions and utilities, most of which are located in the United States. SecureWorks provides managed security services, including intrusion-detection technology along with virus and spam filtering for email.

A few weeks ago, we ran Mick Moignard’s "LSI_Info: obscure but useful information in LotusScript", a neat little article explaining how to get additional status information in Notes. Reader Julian Robichaux sent us a message that adds a little more information to LSI_Info.

Read this DominoPower article.

The 33-year-old British expat in Paris writes under the pseudonym "La Petite Anglaise" and tells of love affairs, single motherhood and office bloopers with self-deprecating, "Bridget Jones"-style humor. She kept her popular blog anonymous, never revealing her full name or workplace. But despite her attempts at secrecy, her employer found out and fired her–unusual in labor-protected France, where workers have strong legal protections. Now she’s suing her employer in a case generating buzz on both sides of the English Channel.

Analysts agree that most enterprises have reached a point where they can effectively block many forms of spyware, but targeted attacks at specific companies and the need to further integrate security technologies are both keeping businesses on their toes. Much as in their battle against unsolicited spam email, enterprises are having success in reducing the impact of spyware programs, but a new breed of targeted attacks combined with a constantly changing array of delivery methods has kept the malicious code on IT administrators’ radar.

A second Trojan used in the latest zero-day attack against Microsoft Office contains characteristics that pinpoint corporate espionage as the main motive, according to virus hunters tracking the threat. According to an alert from Symantec, a backdoor called Trojan.Riler.F is installing itself as a layered service provider, or LSP, allowing it access to every piece of data entering and leaving the infected computer. An LSP is a legitimate system driver linked deep into the networking services of Windows. It is used primarily to allow the operating system to connect to other computers, but virus writers have found a way to make malicious programs work as LSPs to hijack sensitive data during transmission.

Networking giant Cisco Systems has fixed several flaws in a security monitoring product meant to protect networks against attacks. The company outlined the vulnerabilities in its Cisco Security Monitoring Analysis and Response System in an advisory Wednesday. The three vulnerabilities could allow intruders to gain remote access to systems and to glean sensitive information, Cisco said. They relate to the CS-MARS system itself and to the way it interacts with software from Oracle and JBoss.

A banner advertisement posted on the MySpace Web site may have infected more than one million users with adware, according to security firm iDefense. The advertisement was included in user profiles on MySpace and could have been operating for about one week. The deckoutyourdeck.com advertisement exploited a flaw in the way Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser handles Windows Metafile image files. Users running unpatched versions of IE would never have realized that the banner ad had silently installed programs that generate pop-up ads on their system.

Zend, a start-up that commercializes the open-source PHP Web site software, plans to release the first version of a higher-level PHP software package at an October conference, company co-founders said Wednesday. Zend announced the open-source Zend Framework at the company’s 2005 PHP conference and plans to release version 1.0 or a preview version of it at the next show on Oct. 29 in San Jose.

Many people see Web journals, or blogs, as alternatives to the mainstream media, but most Americans who run them do so as a hobby rather than a vocation, according to a report released on Wednesday. About 77 percent of blog authors, or bloggers, said they post to express themselves creatively rather to get noticed or paid, according to the report, released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The report also found that 37 percent of bloggers cited their life and experiences as their primary topics, while politics and government came in second at 11 percent.