A federal grand jury has indicted a Brazilian man for his role in the proliferation of the infamous Shadow botnet. Leni de Abreu Neto of Taubate, Brazil, was indicted on one count of conspiracy to cause damage to computers worldwide by a federal grand jury in New Orleans for his role in a conspiracy to sell a network of computers infected with malicious software, according to the Department of Justice.

The indictment alleges that prior to May 2008, Neto worked with others, including unindicted co-conspirator Nordin Nasiri of Sneek, Netherlands, to maintain, use, lease and sell an illegal botnet that infected more than 100,000 computers worldwide. DOJ officials said Neto used the botnet and paid for the servers hosting it.

Why does Web Oriented Architecture (WOA) have so many dedicated and zealous fans, while SOA gets pounded by endless bad press? People simply like WOA a lot more than SOA. At least that’s the conclusion reached by Roger Smith in a recent article published in InformationWeek. But does winning the popularity contest mean WOA is a better option for enterprises?

A quick and uncontrolled survey of several colleagues had shocking results: Over half of calls to surveyed IT consultants and Help Desk professionals are about viruses and spyware.

Protecting your clients from these threats is becoming a full-time job for some of you because the perpetrators are getting smarter, and users are still uneducated. That’s where you come in–it’s your job to help clients adopt, implement, and enforce a proactive policy that will protect the systems that you support.

The reality show America’s Toughest Jobs debuts on Monday. Contestants will be logging, oil drilling, building bridges, and bullfighting. All of those jobs are rough and flashy and that stuff makes for good television, but if you want to talk about the toughest jobs in America then IT deserves a place on the list.

Working in IT is one of the toughest jobs in world, and TechRepublic is there to make it a little easier for the 10 million IT pros on the planet. There’s often not a lot of sympathy for IT as a hard job because IT workers are typically well paid, and it is a desk job, after all. The following is a list of five things that can make working in IT tortuous at times.

Explore automated testing of Adobe Flex applications, a capability that was introduced in IBM(R) Rational(R) Functional Tester Version 7.0.1. This article gives you a quick introduction to this feature and walks you through an example in which you record test cases and then play them back.

IBM continues sounding the charge on bringing its enterprise software to mobile users by introducing several new offerings, as well as partnerships with carriers AT&T and Sprint to extend its Rational, Lotus, and Domino applications to wireless devices.

Products include Rational Host Access Transformation Services (HATS), an application that allows mobile devices users to access mainframe applications. The new WebSphere Business Monitor software, which enables enterprises to measure business processes and performance, is now available for Research in Motion’s BlackBerry devices, and will be provided for the Apple iPhone in the fourth quarter of 2008. IBM also said the carriers certified its Lotus Notes Traveler software for select smartphones.

Mozilla this week is touting technology to boost performance of its JavaScript engine and Web applications. Called TraceMonkey, the technology adds native code compilation to the engine, which itself is called SpiderMonkey, said Mike Shaver, Mozilla vice president of engineering, in a blog post on Friday. The software builds on code and ideas shared with the Tamarin Tracing project, Shaver said.

TraceMonkey was placed in the Firefox 3.1 development tree this week. It is slated to be featured in Firefox 3.1, which is due to be available the end of this year.

Managers’ reality check: Your top workers can almost always get another job, even in a shaky economy. "The best employees are being recruited at any given time. Managers need to make that assumption and create an environment that’s going to make them want to stay," says Paul De Young, a talent management practice leader at Watson Wyatt Worldwide, a global consulting firm.

Are you really doing that? Or do your management tactics have people scurrying for the exits? Before you answer, consider these cautionary tales that can help you avoid pushing your own top talent out the door.

Congratulations, you won the lottery in a country whose name you can’t even pronounce! A wealthy oil executive in a far-off land wants to give you millions of dollars, right now! Sexy girls want to meet you! Now let’s be honest. If someone came to your door and told you any of those things, you’d tell him to get lost. So why do people still fall for this stuff when it’s in their email, as if a poorly written message made a weird-sounding pitch any more legitimate?

The saddest part is, the only reason annoying email keeps filling your inbox is because it works. No matter the number of reports detailing email hoaxes gone bad and tales of spammers taking people for all they’re worth, people just keep on clicking. Why? It’s the law of percentages. The response rate for snail-mail spam is between 0.5 and 1 percent. That might not sound like a lot, but if you apply it to email, it means a spammer can send 1 million messages–without the cost of paper and postage–and 5,000 to 10,000 people will answer. In fact, a study out this month indicates that nearly 30 percent of Internet users confessed to purchasing something from spam email. Here’s PC World’s list, in no particular order, of the top email hoaxes that have come through inboxes and fooled millions.

The proliferation of enterprise Web 2.0 has created new and different demands on the IT staff that requires knowledge of traditional legacy skills such as COBOL, C and proprietary applications as well as more modern technologies. To maximize existing investments and embrace enterprise Web 2.0, IT is turning to application modernization technologies.

However, if you’re an IT manager or CIO, you may want to gather the troops before you begin the modernization process as even the best laid plans can go awry. Following are the top five issues that your IT staff wants you to know before you begin… but is afraid to tell you.