The Bush administration, seeking to revive an online pornography law struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, has subpoenaed Google for details on what its users have been looking for through its popular search engine. Google has refused to comply with the subpoena, issued last year, for a broad range of material from its databases, including a request for 1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period, lawyers for the U.S. Justice Department said in papers filed Wednesday in federal court in San Jose.

Researchers at Sunbelt Software have uncovered a special program they said they believe is being used to create keylogging and Trojan horse programs that target customers of financial institutions in the United Kingdom, United States, and Canada. Researchers recently discovered the "builder" program on a Web site that was harvesting information from a variant of a Trojan horse program known as WinLdra. The program provides an easy-to-use interface for creating new variants of WinLdra that can steal credit card numbers and online banking log-ins from machines on which it is installed, and can direct e-Gold payments into an account owned by the attacker.

Security vendor F-Secure issued a patch Thursday to deal with critical flaws in a number of its antivirus and Internet security products. Flaws in the way F-Secure software handles ZIP and RAR data compression archives could allow an attacker to execute remote code on users’ systems and also to bypass F-Secure’s antivirus-scanning capabilities. Vulnerabilities were found in 19 versions of F-Secure’s antivirus products for Microsoft Windows, as well as in its products for Linux.

Avalon Business Systems will be demonstrating its ReduceMail Pro Advanced system for Lotus Notes at Lotusphere 2006. ReduceMail Pro Advanced now features all-in-the-mailfile access to archived mail for both the end user and administrator. This allows auditable storage management for the Lotus Notes administrator with minimal impact on the end user. ReduceMail Pro Advanced all-in-the-mailfile approach allows the Lotus Notes administrator to control archived mail as if the mail resided in the mailfile. Mail can be audited and removed by the Lotus Notes administrator as if it was never archived. End users have access to archived mail through the Lotus Notes client, the IBM Lotus iNotes client, and the WebMail client. All mail is contained and managed through one folder structure from all access points.

Ah, Lotusphere. It’s that special time when most of the Lotus technical community runs away from the cold and seeks out sunny Orlando. DominoPower, of course, will be at Lotusphere in force. In this great article, we tell you the secrets behind a shady firm called Tomahawk Properties, why you shouldn’t pack too many shirts, and where to find the JAMFests. It’s all in this article.

Read this DominoPower article.

Two makers of backup software are dealing with security holes that could let an outsider hijack customers’ systems. EMC has issued patches for flaws in its NetWorker product, while code that takes advantage of a known vulnerability in Veritas’ NetBackup has been publicly released.

Research In Motion says its BlackBerry email device is so critical that a court-ordered shutdown of U.S. service could threaten public safety and business productivity. The Canadian company is trying to avoid a possible injunction, the result of a long-running infringement case won by NTP Inc., a tiny patent-holding firm. In a filing Tuesday in federal court in Richmond, RIM argued that there is "exceptional public interest" in keeping BlackBerries beeping. And the idea of exempting government and emergency users from an injunction–which NTP has suggested–would result in errors, RIM said. [Somehow, I just don’t see it being all that bad.–Ed.]

Daniel Lin, the first person prosecuted under the 2004 federal antispam law, pleaded guilty Tuesday to three felony charges, federal prosecutors announced. Two of the counts were related to sending millions of unsolicited spam emails, and the third was for a firearms violation. Lin, 30, faces a possible five-year prison sentence and a $250,000 fine, federal officials said. Lin and three other men were accused of operating an illegal spam operation. The group sent more than 450,000 spam advertisements for fraudulent weight-loss and erectile dysfunction products, according to reports. Lin is scheduled to be sentenced in May.

A Web site that earned an enterprising British student $1 million suffered a crippling attack by ransom-seeking hackers. Alex Tew, 21, said Wednesday that his Million Dollar Homepage was targeted after he publicized how it had helped him raise money for his university studies. Tew said that on Jan. 7, he received a threat from an organization calling itself "The Dark Group," demanding that he pay them $50,000 within 72 hours or face having his site taken down.

SPI Dynamics unveiled a management platform for measuring Web application security risk. AMP (Assessment Management Platform) 2.0 consolidates network scanning across enterprise networks and adds features like scheduling for Web application scans, user role-based access control and auditing, said Erik Peterson, SPI Dynamics’ vice president of product marketing. AMP works with SPI’s WebInspect Web application security scanning software. Using a dedicated AMP server, companies can centralize management of WebInspect scanners. A SQL database on the AMP server collects Web application scan data and allows managers to do application risk assessment.