A cyberattack has caused a power blackout in multiple cities outside the United States, the CIA has warned. The SANS Institute, a computer-security training body, reported the CIA’s disclosure on Friday. CIA senior analyst Tom Donahue told a SANS Institute conference on Wednesday in New Orleans that the CIA had evidence of successful cyberattacks against critical national infrastructures outside the United States.

"We have information that cyberattacks have been used to disrupt power equipment in several regions outside the U.S.," Donahue said. "In at least one case, the disruption caused a power outage affecting multiple cities."

Donahue added that the CIA does not know who executed the attacks or why but that all of the attacks involved "intrusions through the Internet."

IBM announced a roadmap of innovations, products, services and Business Partner initiatives designed to make IBM Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino software, licensed to 140 million users, the desktop of the future.

IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8 enterprise collaboration software was developed with input from more than 25,000 customers. Shipping since August 2007, Lotus Notes 8 software transforms the inbox into an integrated workspace, bringing together email, calendar, instant messaging, office productivity tools and collaborative applications. IBM announced that it plans to ship Lotus Notes and Domino 8.0.1 in February with several significant updates that help users harness the power of the Web.

IBM announced that it will offer an integrated Open Collaboration Client Solution with support for Ubuntu, a Linux-based operating system from Canonical that is especially popular for desktops, laptops and thin clients.

Showing strong momentum around its IBM Lotus Notes 8 and IBM Lotus Symphony-based Open Collaboration Client Solution, IBM also announced a new agreement working with Red Hat targeting small and medium-sized enterprises, and momentum in the Open Collaboration Client Solution powered by SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell that was announced in August 2007. The announcements were made at the opening of Lotusphere in Orlando.

Research In Motion announced a series of updates for its BlackBerry platform that include enhanced messaging and collaboration, simpler management, enhanced security and expanded application development support. These updates will benefit users, IT groups and developers and will enable organizations to increase mobility, productivity and return on investment.

Stampede Technologies, provider of acceleration solutions for IBM Lotus Notes and Domino users, as well as WAN Optimization and Application Acceleration solutions, announced at Lotusphere the release of TurboGold Enterprise Edition Release 3 (TGEE 3.0) for Linux-based servers. TGEE 3.0 improves performance and robustness of Notes and Domino applications by reducing bandwidth consumption by up to 85 percent, regardless of network infrastructure, giving enterprises a competitive edge. Stampede has always supported multiple server platforms for TGEE, including Windows 32 servers, IBM iSeries and pSeries servers. With this new release customers now have the flexibility to deploy TGEE on an even broader range of state-of-the-art enterprise servers.

Before 7,000 customers and partners at the annual Lotusphere conference, IBM and SAP AG announced plans to deliver their first joint software product codenamed "Atlantic" that will integrate IBM Lotus Notes software with SAP Business Suite. The combined efforts to create "Atlantic" will result in a new style of applications that present information and data in the context of users familiar with the Lotus Notes desktop. This will make it easier for users to do their jobs and greatly enhance the return on investment that companies have made in their SAP applications.

Providing workers with access to critical business information in this intuitive, easy-to-use interface will enable timely, more informed business decisions. All types of employees can benefit from increased business analysis, information capabilities and the power to run their business operations directly from their Lotus Notes desktop.

At Lotusphere, IBM announced plans for a software portfolio expansion geared to the needs of millions of companies from 5 to 500 employees that want to focus on growing their businesses instead of running their office systems.

IBM Lotus Foundations is a future line of small business software servers, installed on-premise, and is expected to be offered primarily through IBM Business Partners. In addition, IBM announced a managed beta of aWeb-delivered service codenamed "Bluehouse." "Bluehouse" provides extranet services that make it easy for small-and- medium sized companies to securely collaborate beyond their organizational boundaries.

The combination of Lotus Foundations and "Bluehouse" will provide essential software solutions in simple to acquire and manage packages. Small-and-medium sized businesses (SMBs) need superior collaboration and business solutions as much as large companies. With Lotus Foundations and Bluehouse, used separately or in combination, organizations will be able to take advantage of proven enterprise-strength software delivered as a turn-key package for start-up businesses without IT staff.

In spite of their public opposition to Microsoft’s attempt to get the ISO standardization nod for its Office Open XML (OOXML) document format, IBM and Google quietly are supporting OOXML. That’s according to two blog postings from the end of last week by Microsoft execs involved in the OOXML vs. Open Document Format (ODF) standards battle.

In a blog post entitled, "Speaking of odd contradictions…" Gray Knowlton, Microsoft Group Product Manager of the Office technical product management team, cited IBM’s support for OOXML in two products: IBM DB2 Content Manager v8.4 and IBM Websphere Portal. A company spokeswoman said Microsoft also had discovered IBM is supporting OOXML in its IBM Lotus Quickr team-collaboration product, as well as in IBM DB2 9 pureXML.

Voltage Security announced Voltage SecureFile for IBM Lotus Quickr, bringing information encryption to documents within the Lotus collaboration environment. Voltage SecureFile, powered by Voltage Identity-Based Encryption (Voltage IBE), secures files no matter how or where they are transported after they leave the Lotus Quickr environment. Voltage SecureFile for IBM Lotus Quickr offers several key benefits to customers that have deployed the IBM collaboration environment. Specifically, it enables businesses to secure information workflows, protect the integrity of their brand reputation, ensure customer confidence, mitigate potential risk involved in a data breach (by loss or theft), and meet compliance regulations.

Stampede Technologies, provider of acceleration solutions for IBM Lotus Notes and Domino users, as well as WAN Optimization and Application Acceleration solutions, announced today at Lotusphere the release of TurboGold Enterprise Edition Release 3 for Domino 8. TGEE 3.0 improves performance and robustness of Notes and Domino applications by reducing bandwidth consumption by up to 85 percent, regardless of network infrastructure, giving enterprises a competitive edge.