Businesses are afraid of cyber-crime, and rightly so, as a survey of nearly 1,400 IT security professionals by Finjan found 25 percent admitted experiencing a security breach at their company.

Another 42 percent could not rule out the possibility that their data had been breached. The statistics, contained in Finjan’s "Web Security Survey 2008" report, come on the heels of a survey by Forrester Research that found about 96 percent of IT security pros expect their budgets to either increase or stay the same in the coming year.

Email has been around in one format or another for nearly 50 years, yet by the looks of recent news headlines, we might have another 50 to go before we master it.

Although it hasn’t been officially announced, Carat, a New York media agency, is planning a major restructuring of its U.S. operations, including an undetermined number of layoffs. So how do we know about this? Is it because we have a finely-tuned ear to the workings of the New York media world? Of course not. By way of AdAge.com, we learned that the agency’s top New York-based HR executive emailed this information to the entire agency.

Flowfinity Wireless announced it is launching Flowfinity Forms 5.5 at the CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment tradeshow. Flowfinity Forms is designed to allow businesses to build, deploy and manage the mobile forms they need for business critical data collection in the field while also making the experience easy and productive for the mobile users. With Flowfinity Forms 5.5, the ability to capture pictures using the built-in camera featured on the BlackBerry Pearl and BlackBerry Curve series smartphones, as well as the new BlackBerry Bold smartphone from Research In Motion, combined with support for recording barcodes, recording GPS coordinates and over 25 different data field types makes this approach to mobile data collection highly comprehensive.

Hewlett-Packard is claiming that the HP EliteBook 6930p, when coupled with new features and a 12-cell lithium ion battery option, has enough battery life to last 24 hours. The HP notebook battery life claim comes a few weeks after Dell announced its Latitude E6400 corporate notebook that offers up to 19 hours of battery life with a special Dell battery feature.

The sentence comes in for a participant in a high-tech stock fraud scheme that involved hacking into U.S. brokerage accounts to make unauthorized purchases of thinly traded stocks to drive up the price. When the prices began to rise, hackers then dumped their own shares in the same stocks for a profit. The hack, pump and dump scheme hit at least 60 online stock traders and nine brokerage firms including TD Ameritrade, ETrade Financial, Firstrade Securities, ChoiceTrade, OptionsXpress, TradeKing and Terra Nova Financial.

Countrywide Mortgage has started notifying customers that a rogue employee (since dismissed) may have sold sensitive personal information to an unidentified third party.

The company mailed "urgent security notification" letters to customers this week, warning that the customer information involved included names, addresses, social security numbers, mortgage loan numbers and "various other loan and application information."

IBM announced 30 new products and services, saying that it took an investment of $2 billion, three years, and 2,500 engineers and other specialists from nine countries to complete the project. IBM said that all the new products and services fall under the auspices of its New Enterprise Data Center strategy, which utilizes intellectual property IBM has acquired in the last two years.

In the broadening data center cost-saving and energy efficiency discussion, data center physical infrastructure preventive maintenance (PM) is sometimes neglected as an important tool for controlling TCO and downtime.

This document describes the types of PM services that can help safeguard the uptime of data centers and IT equipment rooms. Various PM methodologies and approaches are discussed. Recommended practices are suggested.

Agito Networks announced the availability of the next-generation version of its RoamAnywhere Mobility Router, for enhanced enterprise mobile voice. RoamAnywhere is the industry’s most powerful enterprise fixed mobile convergence (eFMC) product, purpose built for enterprises to help them increase mobile worker productivity while reducing cellular costs. Agito uniquely fuses Wi-Fi, cellular, IP telephony, and location information to improve the accessibility and responsiveness of mobile workers, while drastically reducing mobile costs. Updates to Agito’s enterprise mobility solution include Secure Remote Voice, Dual Persona, advances in Least Cost Routing, and the broadest PBX and handset support.

IBM Sametime 3-D is a mashup of IBM’s Lotus Sametime instant messaging and collaboration application with virtual worlds, such as OpenSim. No word on whether or not it will work with Second Life, but IBM will look to take Sametime 3-D out of application development and make it an enterprise application within the Lotus unified communications and collaborations suite.