Although it has been a widely held belief among companies that insiders are responsible for most data breaches, a new study released June 11 claims 73 percent of breaches result from external sources versus 18 percent from insider threats.

Skewering some basic corporate security tenets, the study by Verizon Business also contends nearly 9 in 10 data breaches could have been prevented with reasonable security measures in place. The study covered four years and more than 500 investigations involving 230 million records.

Moreover, the study claims, most breaches resulted from a combination of events rather than a single action with 62 percent attributed to "significant internal errors" that either directly or indirectly contributed to a breach. For breaches that were deliberate, 59 percent were the result of hacking and intrusions.

Symantec is launching a new assault on the challenges surrounding enterprise IT risk management. The company is planning a new version of its Control Compliance Suite with a number of new features designed to help enterprises automate the compliance process and make IT risk assessment more scalable for Symantec customers.

IT departments, with the exception of those that serve the housing and credit sectors, have been so far immune to the effects of the economic slowdown. But new data suggests techies are feeling the squeeze as well–and significantly so. IT compensation remained flat in the first two quarters of 2008, found the 2008 Mid-Year IT Salary Survey from Janco Associates, a management consultancy.

Staff-level IT professionals at large enterprises saw only a .12 percent increase in their median compensation between June 2007 and June 2008, according to the survey, while in midsize enterprises, salaries grew only slightly more, by .49 percent.

IBM announced the next wave of social networking tools for business. Lotus Connections 2.0 and IBM Atlas for Lotus Connections feature a mix of new capabilities that blend IBM’s expertise in business software with the Web 2.0 capabilities popular in consumer social networking Web sites.

The newest version of IBM Lotus Connections–successor to the fastest growing new IBM software product–is taking a cue from public social networks. Now people can quickly grow their professional network of contacts by adding colleagues. This business equivalent of "friending" helps people effectively manage their network and find expertise.

The new home page streams feeds from various components of Lotus Connections and shows people what is happening within their network. Widgets let people customize the main page and add links to external communities such as Facebook or custom business applications used within the organization.

As part of IBM’s "Project Big Green" offerings, IBM announced new storage virtualization software that helps clients more efficiently manage and consolidate volumes of business data, providing clients with a storage solution designed to help improve utilization rates, energy efficiency, availability, and scalability of critical applications.

The capabilities of the new IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) 4.3 software can help significantly improve the flexibility and responsiveness of IT infrastructures by creating consolidated, virtual pools of information across the enterprise, which enables IT departments to respond more quickly to client needs and centrally manage resources. Storage virtualization technology can reduce requirements for additional physical storage hardware systems, which can ultimately reduce overall energy usage in the data center.

IBM announced the results of a client survey that concludes that businesses around the world are quickly moving from the adoption phase of a service oriented architecture (SOA) strategy to the actual deployment of SOA technologies and services. According to the survey, the rate of SOA deployments is on the rise, an indication that business leaders are seeking the benefits of SOA for today’s challenging business environments.

SOA is a business strategy that helps a company reuse existing technology to more closely align it with business goals, driving efficiencies, cost savings, productivity, and enabling the creation of more modular and global business designs. SOA has grown increasingly popular among businesses looking to accelerate cost savings and a return on investment (ROI). The survey was conducted for IBM by the Link Group and consisted of a sampling of 300 clients at the IBM IMPACT 2008 event, the industry’s largest SOA conference, which drew nearly 6,300 technical and business leaders.

This makes life interesting–knowing what you could be earning in a few years time once you’ve got your degree. The idea behind this Web site is (other than extreme nosiness) available information on who is earning what, at which company. It’s not as specific to the point you can type in "Jonathan Schwartz" and "Sun Microsystems" and get his exact salary, but it’s not far off.

Start off by creating an account with Glassdoor.com which adds to the database of salaries–you are asked to provide your salary information for your company (past or present) anonymously which then gets added, but you are then given access to the site for a set period of time. By checking the salaries page, you can find out how much those in specific positions earn, whether they are at Microsoft, Apple, Intel, even those like the Bank of America or Verizon.

Everyone gets stressed from time to time, usually at the office. The question is, do you send stress packing or let it upset your whole day? If you fall into the latter category, check out Dumb Little Man’s five tips on relaxing at work when stress strikes.

Scientists unveiled the world’s fastest supercomputer, a $100 million machine that for the first time has performed 1,000 trillion calculations per second in a sustained exercise.

The technology breakthrough was accomplished by engineers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and IBM on a computer to be used primarily on nuclear weapons work, including simulating nuclear explosions.

The computer, named Roadrunner, is twice as fast as IBM’s Blue Gene system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which itself is three times faster than any of the world’s other supercomputers, according to IBM.

Virus analysts at Kaspersky Lab have intercepted a new variant of Gpcode, a malicious virus that encrypts important files on an infected desktop and demands payment for a key to recover the data.

The biggest change in this variant of the ransomeware is the use of RSA encryption algorithm with a 1024-bit key, making it impossible to crack without without the author’s key.