Finjan’s Malicious Code Research Center has uncovered half a gigabyte of stolen data from US Healthcare organizations and from a major airline on crimeware servers in Argentina and Malaysia.

Five hours after Mozilla officially released Firefox 3.0, researchers found a vulnerability in the new browser. Tipping Point has verified the bug and reported it to Mozilla.

Since Mozilla is still working on a fix, the researchers won’t share details about the problem. Tipping Point ranked the severity of the vulnerability as high, but said that users would have to click on a link in an email or visit a malicious Web page before being affected. The issue affects users of Firefox 3.0 as well as Firefox 2.0.

A study of IT "abandonment" reported by the British Computer Society (BCS) reinforces the notion that IT projects fail primarily for non-technical causes. Such quantitative research is important in helping managers understand the business, organizational, political, and cultural dimensions behind failed projects. Here’s the BCS list of "key reasons why projects get canceled."

With the new version of Apple’s iPhone on the way, enterprises need to be ready to deal with the security implications of employees’ smartphones.

Whether IT organizations are ready or not, smartphones are a reality for enterprises. Gartner analysts predicted in a January report that smartphone sales will reach about 173 million in 2008, a jump of 42 percent from last year. The iPhone 3G, slated to be available July 11, is Apple’s latest attempt to capitalize on consumers’ desire for Internet-enabled phones with more and more functionality.

But with adoption of these devices increasing, organizations need to assess their policies to control any potential threat to corporate data. For Rob Israel, CIO of John C. Lincoln Health Network, in Phoenix, that means allowing only BlackBerry and GoodLink devices on the network.

Every project management trainee is (or should be) taught the triple constraints of time, scope, and cost. These constraints represent trade-offs; you can’t change one without affecting the other two.

Email–once a breakthrough in silent, speedy, low-cost communication technology that so seamlessly fits into the information worker’s day it barely goes noticed in 2008–is starting to get a bad rap. A typical office worker checks email more than 50 times a day, IMs 77 times and visits more than 40 Web sites a day, according to a study by tracking-software maker RescueTime cited in a New York Times article published June 14.

According to Basex, a company that researches workers’ efficiency, email is part of the 28 percent, or largest segment of an employee’s day that is spent dealing with interruptions that aren’t urgent or important. It takes time to get back on track afterward, at a cost of $650 billion a year in lost productivity.

From SMBs to the Enterprise, the need for email security has never been greater. But just maintaining even the most simple email threat protection is anything but a simple effort. It’s costly, in both time and money, and it’s difficult to manage… especially when it comes to updates and compliance. So what’s the secret to both robust protection and simplified management?

TechRepublic presents Email Security for Any Business, an on-demand Webcast about the need for email threat protection as well as the solutions and best practices for more affordable and manageable email security.

Hewlett-Packard introduced a new industrial-strength blade server, Integrity NonStop NB50000c BladeSystem, on June 16 at its annual Technology Forum & Expo in Las Vegas, and aimed it directly at existing IBM mainframe users for consideration as an alternative system.

The new blade server, a cousin of the company’s BladeSystem C-class series–which it debuted two years ago–is designed specifically for high-transaction industries such as financial, telecommunications, public sector and high-volume Web 2.0 companies.

As a support person, your first priority is to protect your end users and help them do their job with the tools they’re given. The story of what happened to Michael Fiola is a cautionary tale that all support personnel should take to heart.

Bank of America says that some of the information from its check cards have been compromised. In a letter to customers Bank of America said:

We have learned that information from certain Bank of America Check Cards may have been compromised. Your Check Card number may have been part of this compromise. To ensure that your privacy is protected to the best of our ability we have taken the following steps:

We will monitor activity on your Bank of America account; if we detect any suspicious transactions we will notify you immediately.