Could that PDF file attachment be malicious? Maybe. More and more PDF files are coming in as attachments on unsolicited junk mail and spam. PDF is the portable document format created by Adobe a zillion years ago. And it has become the defacto standard for moving virtual versions of documents around the Web. PDF files offer a locked or nearly locked version of the original and are traditionally safe to use.

Usually dubious attachments come in as DOC formats or other more open standards. And over the years there has been controversy about how vulnerable PDFs are.

Alexander Gostev, Senior Virus Analyst at Kaspersky Lab noticed that a strange thing happened in June: The program that took first place on the Online Scanner Top 20 as the most widespread malicious program is, in fact, not a malicious program at all.

In addition, June’s online scanner top ten features six new malicious programs, half of which are new versions of Trojan downloaders. That means that they will be installing new, updated modifications of all sorts of malware on infected computers.

And on the email front, after a long hiatus first place was again taken by the all-time leader of 2004 and 2005: the NetSky.q worm. Right on its heels is a worm from an equally old family, Bagle.gt. The reports are now available on Kaspersky’s Viruslist site.

With industry analysts warning that business data continues to fill up storage at an average of 60 percent per year, enterprises of all sizes eventually need to make a strategic decision: Will they take better control over the organization of their data as it comes into the system, or will the data simply keep piling up in servers and storage without a clue about access and security?

Steven Adler, IBM’s program director of data governance solutions, suggests that being proactive and assessingthe notion of "data governance" as soon as possible is a key move for a business of any size.

IBM is putting its considerable resources into building enterprise search technologies, both in its Lotus and WebSphere product lines and in areas of research and development like terrorist communication mapping or pharmaceutical drug interaction tracking.

IBM announced June 29 the latest version of its namesake OmniFind Enterprise Edition that essentially brings an enterprise dashboard that enables search, discover and analysis for Lotus Domino and WebSphere Portal. The dashboard makes it easier for users to find information buried in Lotus databases–and other databases–as well as in intranet portals, Web sites and file systems, the company said.

Using a unified search interface, users can find information that is stored in a number of IBM software modules, including Lotus Document Manager, Lotus Quickr and Lotus QuickPlace documents. The search interface also taps information stored in applications, repositories and shared files from across a business.

With server-side support for Lotus Domino, OmniFind Enterprise Edition allows users to more easily share documents, presentations, specifications and other files. It also provides indexing of Domino fields including attachments and fielded search, and understands the structure of Lotus Notes databases, with pre-built support for Lotus Quickr, QuickPlace and Domino.Doc databases, Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Exchange. The software can also "crawl" IM Workplace Web Content Management.

For WebSphere workers, OmniFind lets users search directly from within WebSphere Portal, which means users can scale millions of documents, IBM said.

Standards body Ecma International has formed a technical committee to develop a standard built on Microsoft’s XML Paper Specification, a rival file format to Adobe Systems’ Portable Document Format.

According to Ecma’s Web site, the goal of the TC46-XPS Technical Committee is to create "a formal standard for an XML-based electronic paper format and XML-based page description language which is consistent with existing implementations of the format called the XML Paper Specification."

XPS is one of many file formats natively supported in Microsoft’s Office 2007 productivity suite and was developed internally by the company. Currently, Microsoft has the only implementation of XPS. Microsoft had planned to include PDF–used widely as a de facto document standard for years but only submitted to a standards body earlier this year by Adobe–as a native file format as well, but Adobe put the kibosh on that plan. Microsoft does offer PDF as an add-on file format for Office.

As the use of smartphones skyrockets, the need to centrally manage those devices is becoming apparent. Remote PC control provider LogMeIn has jumped in to satisfy that demand with a new Web-based remote control program for centrally managing smartphones.

The new LogMeIn Rescue Mobile software allows help desk technicians or other IT support personnel to take control of a user’s smartphone to remotely troubleshoot and resolve problems. The program, an evolution of LogMeIn’s existing remote control software, Rescue, is aimed at wireless carrier call centers, outsourcers and enterprise IT help desks that are beginning to look at the issue of managing smartphones.

Email and Internet content security provider Marshal announced that "pump-and-dump"spam has dropped significantly, though not all security vendors agree.

Marshal researchers say stock spam now represents five percent of all spam as compared with 50 percent in February. During the past quarter, the amount of pump-and-dump spam, a type of financial fraud involving the artificial inflation of a stock’s price so it can be sold at a higher value, has averaged around 30 percent of all spam messages.

However, in the past four weeks, the Marshal Threat Research and Content Engineering team saw the volume of stock spam drop to 5.1 percent, the lowest point it has seen in 10 months.

Cyber-thieves have set their sights on C-level executives with sophisticated social-engineering techniques designed to steal data, according to security researchers at MessageLabs.

In its monthly report, MessageLabs recorded a sudden spike in the number of targeted attacks June 26, intercepting some 500 attacks that used emails with Microsoft Word document attachments containing malicious code.

The surge, while unusual in its magnitude, follows an increase in the number of targeted attacks MessageLabs researchers have seen during the past few years, said Mark Sunner, chief security analyst for MessageLabs, in Gloucester, England.

It may come as a surprise to many executives, but workers aren’t leaving their jobs just because they are not happy with their pay, according to the experts.

Unless the gap between what an individual is making and the market valuation of their role is particularly wide, a higher salary might be the perk that sweetens the deal, but, in all likelihood, salary issues alone won’t instigate a job change.

In an analysis of 19,700 post-exit surveys and 3,179 comments for PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Saratoga Institute, released June 1, researchers found that the reasons employees left their previous job were strikingly different from what most executives believed them to be.

Building IBM Lotus Sametime on top of Lotus Expeditor lets you use Eclipse as a Plug-in Development Environment to extend Lotus Sametime’s functionality in many ways. This article, part 1 of a four-part series, explains the configuration steps to use Eclipse as a PDE for Lotus Sametime.