A four-month investigation into the inner workings of the phishing scourge that drives identity theft attacks has uncovered an underground ecosystem of compromised Web servers, do-it-yourself phishing kits, brazen credit card thieves and lazy code copycats.

At the Black Hat DC Briefings, security researchers Billy Rios and Nitesh Dhanjani shared the findings of their investigation into the phishing epidemic and warned that the whack-a-mole approach to disabling fake banking sites is a huge waste of time.

The Learning Continuum Company (TLCC), provider of distance learning courses for Lotus products, has announced that a complete line of courses on Notes and Domino 8 for both new and experienced developers, administrators, and users is now available. TLCC’s update courses are for the experienced developer and administrator who wants to learn what’s new in Notes and Domino 8.

New developers and administrators can choose from a complete line of courses to make them an expert at their own pace and at their place. TLCC also has courses for users who are upgrading from a previous version of Notes, have never used Notes before, or are using Domino Web Access 8. TLCC’s developer and adminstrator courses offer expert instructor help should the student have a question.

Opera has shipped a high-priority update to its flagship Web browser to correct multiple flaws that put Windows users at risk of malicious hacker attacks.

With Opera 9.26 for Windows, the Norwegian company shipped patches for at least three vulnerabilities that can be exploited to launch malware installations or conduct identity theft attacks.

The most serious of the three bugs–rated "highly severe" by Opera–can cause the browser to be tricked into treating custom comments in image properties as script.

A U.K. company has come up with a nifty laptop-protection system that can automatically wipe hard disk data on machines taken from authorized locations. Sold as a hosted service, Virtuity’s BackStopp server monitors a protected laptop using any medium available, including the Internet, or locally using Wi-Fi or GSM.

If a laptop is reported stolen–or even just moved from a designated space–the system can reach out and execute a file deletion routine that clears the laptop of all important data.

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, announced the availability of IBM DB2 Express-C 9.5 as software through the Ubuntu Partner Repository and as a virtual appliance running on VMware. Canonical is also making an annual support contract for IBM DB2 Express-C available to its users through shop.canonical.com. This announcement marks the first time that Ubuntu users will be able to buy an annual subscription service directly from the company.

IBM DB2 Express-C is a no-charge edition of the DB2 database server. Ideal for small businesses and multi-branch companies, DB2 Express-C can be setup quickly, is easy-to-use, and includes self-managing capabilities. It also embodies all of the core features of the more scalable DB2 editions, including the revolutionary pureXML technology for powering a new breed of Web 2.0 and SOA based solutions.

Hewlett-Packard’s internal data center consolidation initiative is coming together. In a Feb. 19 call with analysts following HP’s first-quarter financial results, President and CEO Mark Hurd said the company is making progress in its push to reduce the number of its data centers from 85 worldwide to six centers in the United States, a move that could save the company about $1 billion in the next year.

Kaspersky Lab has uncovered a scheme using a greeting card Web site to specifically target financial information from customers of a Mexican bank. The spam was first identified by Kaspersky Lab on the morning of February 19 in the form of a Trojan masked to look like a standard greeting card email. When recipients of the fake card click on the link, a malicious file is downloaded on to their computer.

Once this malicious file is launched, it modifies DNS entries on the user’s computer, so that if they attempt to access the Mexican Banamex banking site through standard addresses like www.banamex.com, they will actually be redirected to a remote malicious user’s site–and of course, if they enter their banking details on that site when prompted, their data will end up in the hands of the bad guys.

Last week, we talked about the Lotusphere announcements about the currently shipping Notes and Domino. This week, it’s time to wrap up our Lotusphere 2008 retrospective, explore some more Lotusphere news, and share with you my final analysis.

Read this DominoPower article.

HP on Tuesday quelled a lot of worries by delivering stronger than expected fiscal first quarter earnings and raising its outlook for the second quarter.

The IT giant, viewed as a proxy for enterprise spending, delivered net income of $2.1 billion, or 80 cents a share, on revenue of $28.5 billion, up from 13 percent a year ago. Excluding charges, HP had earnings of 86 cents a share. That tally handily topped Wall Street estimates calling for earnings of 81 cents a share, according to Thomson Financial.

BlackBerry users in North America were complaining of service problems again on Wednesday morning. Users of the BlackBerry outage newsgroup began reporting problems at around 6 a.m. on the East Coast of the U.S. related to scheduled maintenance on Research In Motion’s network. The issue appeared to get progressively worse, initially affecting about half of users in the Americas but eventually affecting all users, according to users of the newsgroup.