A new vulnerability in Yahoo’s instant messenger program can potentially cause unwanted code to run on a PC, according to security researchers.

Details of the vulnerability were first posted on a Chinese-language security forum and was later confirmed with Yahoo security officials, wrote Wei Wang, a researcher with McAfee’s Avert lab in Beijing, on a company blog. So far, no exploit code has been published, wrote Karthik Raman, also of McAfee.

The many multifaceted interactions between corporate users, BlackBerry Enterprise Servers, Microsoft Exchange servers, networks and other infrastructure can lead to system downtime and can negatively effect worker productivity, as well as cause a major migraine for IT departments, according to a recent vendor-commissioned study.

Zenprise, which offers solutions to proactively troubleshoot problems in BES and Exchange environments, contracted Osterman Research to conduct the study. Respondents include 76 IT decision makers in North American companies running BlackBerry Enterprise Servers for Microsoft Exchange with at least 500 employees.

IBM Rational Asset Manager supports technical managers, analysts, architects, developers, testers, and others in their development reuse activities. Rational Asset Manager is customizable to support the kinds of assets and classifications important to your enterprise, and can be configured through the Rational Asset Manager Web user interface. When Rational Asset Manager is configured, the changes are applied immediately.

Some enterprises need to communicate and discuss the Rational Asset Manager configuration before committing it to the repository. The Rational Asset Manager Configurator provides a way to visualize the Rational Asset Manager configuration in models, allowing them to be shared, discussed, and refined. The models are transformed into an XMI format and imported to configure Rational Asset Manager. The Rational Asset Manager Configurator also builds models from the exported Rational Asset Manager XMI files.

IBM Lotus Notes V8 greatly improves the user experience, including its enhancements to the free-time lookup feature on the meeting invitation. In previous Lotus Notes releases, the Scheduler user interface did not provide much flexibility. Lotus Notes V8, however, lets users select subsets of participants, thereby allowing them to focus on the invitees who are most important or critical to the meeting. In this way, the Scheduler UI helps to speed up the search process for available time. Even more conveniently, Lotus Notes V8 allows the user to right-click on one or more active names and to perform a Find Available Time search to quickly find the next time that person is available to meet.

This article, part 3 in a six-part series on deploying IBM Lotus Connections, focuses on system maintenance, backup and recovery strategies, and tips to protect your environment from unexpected data loss or corruption. This article also covers practices for policing your Lotus Connections content.

Storm, the Trojan that hoovers PCs into hacker-controlled botnets, roared back into life last month in several waves, security researchers said Monday, and has blown by 2005’s Sober to become the most prolific email-borne malware ever.

"This is the biggest since Sober in mid-to-late 2005," said Sam Masiello, the director of threat research at MX Logic, referring to a long-lasting worm whose variants struck repeatedly in the second half of 2005, often in extremely high numbers. In November 2006, for instance, email filtering companies reported malware-laden email counts spiking 1,500 percent in a week, and said they were intercepting four times the usual number of infected messages.

According to MX Logic, Storm–a bot Trojan that collects compromised computers into large networks of ready-to-use PCs–has broken Sober’s records. Thanks to Storm, the Englewood, Colo. managed email security vendor tracked a July jump in malicious email of 1,700 percent over June.

We started this investigation asking the same question Senator Patrick Leahy and Representative Henry Waxman asked: where have all the emails gone? However, after five months of very in-depth research, we’ve come to the conclusion that the missing email messages are the least of our concerns. In this critical article, we provide our analysis of the priorities that need to be considered. We look at the root causes for the problems with White House email and lay the groundwork for what will be our final recommendations.

Read this DominoPower article.

ZATZ Senior Editor James Booth has taken an interest in sailing, in particular, long-term, self-sustaining voyages on the open ocean. With the millions of ZATZ publication readers worldwide, there must be a few sailing experts among our readership. James is asking them to contact him at jbooth@zatz.com, that he may pick their collective brains regarding sailing and IT technology.

More than half of IT organizations are using virtualization technologies, according to a vendor-sponsored survey.

Rackspace sponsored a study of 245 customers of its managed hosting business and found that 57 percent of their internal infrastructures were virtualized. Of those surveyed, 72 percent said they would host business-critical applications on virtual machines.

Integrating mobile devices into a disaster recovery plan is something that many IT managers overlook, yet it has become an important part of disaster recovery.

In the past few years, mobile devices have gone from being a "gee-whiz" technology that didn’t quite fit as a corporate necessity to becoming business critical–an absolute necessity from the executive office down to the stockroom floor. The question is, what needs to be done to your disaster recovery plan in order to incorporate these ubiquitous mobile devices? While the answer will be different for every organization, the following steps will help guide you toward the best plan for your company.