An avalanche of new rules for corporate data security and stiff penalties for information burglars are included in a far-reaching bill introduced Wednesday in the U.S. Senate. The bill represents the most aggressive–and at 91 pages, the most regulation-oriented–legislative proposal crafted so far in response to a slew of high-profile security breaches in the last few months.

SBC Communications will offer cable customers three months of free high-speed Internet and satellite television if they switch to SBC’s services, the company said Wednesday. The promotion, which SBC says could be worth up to $340 per customer, is the most aggressive attempt to date by a large local telephone company to lure customers away from cable. SBC’s move comes a few weeks after it lowered the price of its high-speed Internet service to $14.95 per month for new subscribers in its 13-state region.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini on Wednesday defended his company against new legal attacks from Advanced Micro Devices. AMD filed a lawsuit against Intel Monday in U.S. District Court in Delaware. The rival chipmaker claims that Intel is using monopolistic business practices, such as threatening retaliation against customers who do business with AMD. AMD is asking the court to impose punitive damages.

An Internet standards group approved two "experimental" antispam proposals, sidestepping a controversy dividing Microsoft and its email competitors. The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), a division of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), said it would publish two competing and overlapping sets of documents that define ways of confirming that e-mail senders are who they say they are.

Computer security and software companies are urging the U.S. Senate to approve the world’s first treaty targeting cybercrime. A letter from the groups, including the Business Software Alliance, VeriSign, InfraGard and the Cyber Security Industry Alliance, called on senators to ratify the controversial document, which was the subject of a brief flurry of attention last year before it expired without a floor vote.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has asked for changes in the country’s cybersecurity laws to protect the data in foreign work handled by Indian companies. In a meeting Wednesday, Singh directed the Department of Information Technology to hasten the process of amending the Indian IT Act to ensure that any breach of secrecy and any illegal transfer of commercial or privileged information is made a punishable offense.

A federal appeals court overturned a ruling against adware maker WhenU that held it violated the trademarks of vision specialist 1-800-Contacts in the sale and distribution of pop-up advertising. The ruling, delivered Monday by the 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals, reversed an earlier decision that confined WhenU from selling pop-ups triggered by 1-800-Contacts’ trademarks, in violation of the Lanham Act, the U.S. trademark act.

A new version of the Bagle virus is attempting to turn PCs into zombies for use in cyberattack networks. The variant surfaced over the weekend and was spammed to tens of thousands of Internet users, Ero Carrera, a researcher at F-Secure, said Tuesday. The antivirus software maker is calling the offshoot Mitglieder.CN, but it is known by other names, such as Bagle.BQ or Tooso.J, at other security companies.

Emails suggesting there was a conspiracy around Pope John Paul II’s death or that Michael Jackson has passed away could be carrying a worm, experts have warned. Sophos, a U.K. antivirus software maker, warned people on Tuesday about a new worm that poses as a breaking news alert. The worm, called Kedebe-F, spreads via email and uses a variety of subject lines and message bodies. People who take the bait and open the attached file risk having their security software disabled and may pass the worm on to others, Sophos said.

IBM today announced a new solution to help banks renovate their back-office systems and compete more effectively in the emerging "on demand" world. The new Core Systems Transformation solution (CST) represents a $140 million investment by IBM. It is a comprehensive portfolio of transaction processing platforms and services from IBM, which allow banks to migrate their back-office systems to modern Internet architectures in a phased, risk-minimizing manner. The move comes at a time when banks worldwide are grappling with aging back-office systems that are hampering bankers as they seek to improve service to customers, deliver new products, manage costs and strengthen risk controls in today’s competitive and increasingly global banking environment. Banks’ "back-office" or "core-banking" systems are the mission-critical systems that process data and transactions for mortgages, loans and deposits.