IBM announced plans to acquire Massachusetts-based software vendor Watchfire in a bid to beef up compliance testing and security for Web applications as they are being developed.

Financial terms of the deal, which is subject to regulatory approval, were not disclosed. The acquisition is expected to close in the third quarter of 2007.

Oracle has released the newest installment in its Database Lite 10g product line, which is intended to help the mobile work force securely exchange data with a corporate database.

Comprised of a mobile server and a mobile relational database, the latest release, Oracle Database Lite 10g Release 3, features automatic synchronization and support for a broader range of platforms. The product has added client database platform support for Windows Mobile 5, Windows CE Standard SDK 5.0 and Java Database Connectivity support for the Symbian platform. It also now supports two additional languages for stored procedures, C++ and C#/.NET, as well as Oracle Containers for Java for the WebToGo Java development environment.

Could women be the answer to IT’s dwindling work force? Penn State researchers argue the fairer sex is under-represented in the industry, and taking steps to increase their numbers would serve to swell the ranks of the overall work force and promote diversity.

While women accounted for almost 60 percent of the U.S. labor force in 2004, according to the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the same period they accounted for 32 percent of the IT work force. Furthermore, according to a 2005 ITAA (Information Technology Association of America) study, women who leave the IT workplace are less likely than their male counterparts to return.

Researchers at eEye Digital Security are reporting multiple vulnerabilities in Yahoo Messenger they say hackers can use to remotely execute code.

Yahoo spokesperson Terrell Karlsten confirmed the company is looking into a buffer overflow issue in an Active X control.

We continue our analysis of the White House email controversy by looking at the what might have happened to the alleged 5 million missing messages. A key factor may have been a migration from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook in 2002 or 2003. Read this article for our technical analysis and to learn about some of the freaky questions we’ve turned up in the process.

Read this DominoPower article.

Proposion Software announced that its highly successful Proposion Portal Migrator product will evolve into a suite of three software products with the advent of Proposion Portal Migrator 4.0: Proposion Portal Migrator for Notes, Proposion Portal Migrator for QuickPlace, and Proposion Portal Migrator for Domino.Doc. The entire product suite may be purchased and installed as one software resource or as individual products.

Business leaders rank the importance of securing their own data above securing their customers’ data, according to a recent survey of IT executives.

Customer data ranks third on the list of items business leaders worry about protecting from data breaches, according to a poll of 649 IT executives for a study by the Ponemon Institute. Intellectual property and confidential business information took top billing.

Hackers trying to host malicious code on otherwise innocent Web sites are using increasingly sophisticated techniques to avoid detection.

Once hackers have subverted a Web site, it is in their interests to minimize the malicious code’s window of exposure to help prevent detection and subsequent blocking by security software, according to a research paper produced by Finjan, the Web security vendor.

IBM misled investors by overestimating the impact of stock-based compensation expenses on quarterly earnings in 2005, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said on Tuesday.

The securities regulator made the statement as it reached a settlement with International Business Machines Corp., in which the company agreed not to commit future disclosure violations.

The Mozilla Foundation has released security updates to fix multiple flaws that could result in system hijacking in its open-source Firefox browser, Thunderbird email client and SeaMonkey Internet applications suite.

The bugs, deemed critical, are detailed in Mozilla’s Security Advisory 2007-12. They include multiple vulnerabilities in Mozilla’s Layout Engine and in its JavaScript engine that can result in memory corruption and lead to system takeover or DoS (denial of service). The function of a layout engine is to handle content such as HTML, XML, image files and applets as well as formatting information including CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and presentational HTML tags. The layout engine displays the formatted content on-screen, filling in the browser’s content area.