Back when the CAN-SPAM act was passed, there were those who complained about various provisions in it. There have been prosecutions under it, but for the most part it’s been a great legal irrelevancy. This sort of situation is the best we can hope for from Senate bill 2661, The Anti-Phishing Consumer Protection Act of 2008.

The bill is sponsored by Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and co-sponsored by Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., and that Internet expert Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska. The APCPA would make certain new rules about the use of domain names and whois records. It would be specifically illegal to register a domain name used in a commercial endeavor with false or misleading identification information.

IBM announced new services to help organizations use collaboration and social networking to maximize employee talent and performance.

The Enterprise Adaptability services include a unique methodology to determine the return on investment of social networking, use of large scale communications programs to jumpstart adoption, automatic identification of key talent, and social network analysis.

Building on IBM’s leadership in Web 2.0, portal, enterprise content management and collaboration technologies, Enterprise Adaptability is an important part of IBM’s overall consulting and software portfolio to give clients new tools for harnessing the talent and expertise that lies within their organizations, across organizations, and with their partners and customers.

The European Commission gave the go-ahead to IBM’s planned takeover of Swedish software development tool vendor Telelogic on Wednesday, after an in-depth probe of the deal. IBM bid around US$745 million for Telelogic last June. Despite considerable overlaps in their business activities, the Commission concluded that the deal wouldn’t hamper fair competition in the software development tools market.

With the acquisition of Telelogic, IBM will become by far the largest vendor of two types of software development tools: software modelling and requirements management tools. Initially the Commission suspected that the combined strength of the two companies would skew competition in these market sectors, pushing up prices and shutting out competitors.

If you think you work harder than your boss, you’re in the vast majority, and according to some economic theory you’re probably right.

According to a new poll from Monster.com, 77 percent of U.S. workers feel they toil longer and harder than those who sign their paychecks. Though Monster itself admits that their polling process isn’t the most scientific, the sentiment is sure to ring true with working stiffs.

According to Kaspersky’s Senior Virus Analyst Alexander Gostev, February’s report shows virus traffic remains mostly stable. However, Gostev notes, "It’s been some time since we’ve seen an adware program at the top of our online rankings. February, however, saw the adware program Virtumonde or, to be more precise, an entire family, which we detect as Virtumonde.gen, claim top place. Detailed analysis shows that over the last few months there’s been activity leading up to this. Our reports have tracked several Trojan-Downloaders that have installed Virtumonde on victims’ computers. In January and February they even started appearing in mail traffic, which has never happened before."

Kaspersky also lists the top twenty countries which acted as sources for infected messages in February, and the United States topped the list with more than 13%, followed by South Korea and India.

By providing people with mobile access to voice mail, emails and the Internet, smartphones are veritable productivity boosters. Unfortunately, for many businesses these devices are also becoming an information security risk. A study from CompTIA indicates that 60 percent of companies are concerned about securing the sensitive corporate data these handsets can access. At the same time, a National Cyber Security Alliance study indicates that 73 percent of mobile device users don’t think about security issues, and nearly 30 percent give barely a thought to corporate policies on the matter.

SOTI’s MobiControl addresses many common enterprise concerns for mobile security. The software secures data as it travels over cellular and Wi-Fi networks, encrypting the data in transit and as it’s stored on the device so only authorized users can access the information. MobiControl disables device communication when required, and limits user access to prevent harmful Internet downloads and unauthorized software installations. MobiControl also gives businesses the power to remotely "wipe" information from a device if it is lost or stolen and the solution also alerts companies if someone attempts to install unauthorized software on a device, and it provides comprehensive, automated protections such as data encryption, user limitations and intrusion detections.

Kaspersky Lab has identified a new malware scheme taking hold. To start, a user’s computer is infected with a piece of malware called MonaRonaDona. Rather than hiding itself on the machine like most malware, this makes itself highly visible to the user, a probable attempt to get people to Google solutions for MonaRonaDona. Once a user takes that step, you are led to a site called Unigray Antivirus that purports to be a legitimate antivirus company.

A little digging revealed that Unigray has only been a registered Web site for two weeks–an immediate red flag. When you run a scan of your computer using Unigray’s technology, it pops up with completely random infections, calling them all a form of the MondaRonaDona malware. Upon closer inspection, Kaspersky analysts uncovered that Unigray is only capable of removing one piece of malware from a user’s system–you guessed it, the MonaRonaDona malware for a fee of $39.90. This leaves very little doubt that the same group is behind both MonaRonaDona and Unigray.

When you sign up for an email account at Google’s Gmail, you have to navigate past a CAPTCHA–squiggly words and letters that need to be typed into a box to prove you’re human and not an automated system looking to send spam. But in the war against spammers, CAPTCHAs are not holding up well and the latest attacks let spambots into Gmail.

CAPTCHA stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart." Typically image files, the challenge-and-response system has been fairly successful in preventing spammers from opening email accounts on popular Web domains like Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail. Those accounts are prized by spammers because Web administrators can’t simply blacklist the popular domains.

Notorious spammer Robert Soloway will get his day in court next month when his criminal trial kicks off in Seattle.

Soloway was arrested in May and charged with sending out tens of millions of unsolicited messages; so many, in fact, that investigators called him the "Spam King," and his arrest was hailed as a major blow in the fight against spam. Many of Soloway’s unsolicited messages were sent out using hacked "zombie" computers infected with botnet software, prosecutors allege.

Juan de Zulueta, vice president of EMEA [Europe, Middle East and Asia] channels at NetApp, talked with eWEEK about the storage giant’s virtualization strategy during the VMworld conference.

Zulueta said that virtualization can result in savings of up to 90 percent, but also creates a high-risk environment. He said that, "customers need to implement high-end security solutions."