Kaspersky Lab has detected a large-scale, global mass mailing of Valentine’s Day spam. The spam was first identified by Kaspersky Lab on the morning of February 12, and as of the morning of February 13, the number of spam messages of this type have still not decreased. The message currently accounts for about 5-percent of all mail traffic checked by Kaspersky Hosted Security Services.

The text of the message asks recipients to click on a link to view a selection of Valentine’s Day "e-cards." However, clicking on the link simultaneously downloads the malicious file Packed.Win32.Tibs.ic. As the holiday draws near, Kaspersky predicts that the peak in Valentine’s Day spam is still to come.

Little more than one month into 2008, and already this is shaping up to be a year rife with data security incidents at sundry educational institutions. Data maintained at universities contains private and sensitive information. But a recent report by Campus Technology magazine suggests that best practices are not being followed to protect this information.

A growing conflict is emerging within enterprises between the need to enable innovation through mashups and the need to govern the results of these new services.

A mashup is a Web application that combines data or services from more than one source into a single integrated application. The rise of Web services and mashup tools have made it increasingly easier for individuals and departmental users to built productivity-enhancing applications.

But many of those mashups are made without the help of the central IT department in an enterprise, which gives rise to the need for governance. This perceived need was the subject of debate during the 2008 Web Services/SOA on Wall Street conference on Feb. 11.

Enterprise demand for IT professionals capable of working in the Web 2.0 world is growing as more and more firms call upon this technology to address problems facing their information systems.

To date, most IT departments have resisted Web 2.0 tools, viewing them as consumer grade and of secondary interest to their other investments. But this may be changing in 2008.

According to research from Robert Half Technology, an IT recruiting firm, CIOs anticipate a 15 percent increase in the need for IT workers with Web 2.0 application development skills in 2008.

A major service outage afflicted users of the BlackBerry smartphone across the United States and Canada on Monday, wireless carriers said. Officials with AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless said BlackBerry maker Research in Motion told them customers of all wireless carriers were affected.

It was not immediately clear how many BlackBerry subscribers had problems, as some users reported being able to access their service normally Monday afternoon.

They can’t be exploited remotely and they don’t affect Windows systems, but security experts say there are at least two good reasons for IT administrators to worry about flaws in version 2.6 of the Linux Kernel.

First, a vulnerability researcher has released exploit code that could be fashioned into potent attacks against Linux-based environments. Second, a malicious insider could use the flaws to expose sensitive company data.

Forrester Research said that it is downgrading its 2008 forecast for IT purchasing in both the U.S. and around the world. The firm is still predicting increased IT spending, but has dropped its U.S. growth projection to 2.8 percent from 4.6 percent, and its global forecast to 6 percent from 9 percent.

Andrew Bartels, vice president at Forrester, said in a statement that the forecast is based on the assumption a mild recession will hit the U.S. economy in the second or third quarter.

Ubuntu and Red Hat are the most used Linux distributions among the 35,000 members of content-management vendor Alfresco’s community, the company found in its second survey of trends in enterprise open-source software usage.

The surveys help inform Alfresco’s technology strategy, according to Ian Howells, Alfresco’s chief marketing officer. "It’s important for us to know which platforms to test against first," he said, adding, "It’s in users’ interest to give us good data."

Starbucks has upgraded its Wi-Fi offering from a tall to a venti, switching partners from T-Mobile USA to AT&T in a deal that will mean free coffee-shop wireless for millions of U.S. broadband subscribers.

The chain’s network of hotspots, the best-known in the U.S., covers more than 7,000 company-owned stores. Users of AT&T Broadband and U-verse DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) services will get free access to the networks, and the carrier will soon extend benefits to AT&T Wireless customers as well, according to a news release. AT&T business customers with remote-access subscriptions will be able to buy unlimited, flat-rate access at any Starbucks location.

The ease with which users can assemble composite applications from components increases the need to unit test your components before users use them. This article, fourth in the series on composite applications, describes how to test your components prior to assembling composite applications.