The battle for your users’ email inboxes probably will never end, but it’s not a failure of technology. Experienced email and system administrators share the key points they really, really wish you understood. Keith Brooks, vice president at Vanessa Brooks, "Stopping spam is a mixture of luck, intelligence, alcohol and planning." With luck, he says, your CEO never hears about spam. "But without it, the CIO never stops hearing about this issue."

Firefox and Internet Explorer users beware: There are serious, unpatched flaws in both browsers that could allow the manipulation of authentication cookies and the hijacking of files from your Windows machine. Details on both vulnerabilities have already been posted to the Full Disclosure mailing list by Polish researcher Michal Zalewski. SecurityFocus provides coverage of the issue, which dates back to 2006. According to Zalewski, a well-known hacker credited with several major flaw discoveries, there are two very different issues affecting Firefox and IE 7.

A biometric systems vendor has a pitch for CIOs nervous about company executives losing their mobile phones and risking the loss of confidential information. AuthenTec, a developer of biometric fingerprint technology, wants to address concerns handset manufacturers may have about adding advanced security features to their product by reducing the size, power consumption, and cost of its touch-powered sensors.

US researchers have come up with a technique that claims to be able to stop Internet worms within milliseconds of an outbreak. The Proactive Worm Containment system, as its inventors at Penn State University call it, uses no signatures to identify an attack. Instead it relies on the frequency of connections at a packet level, and analyzes the number of connections this traffic is making to other networks. This is said to counter one of the biggest issues in worm defense, namely that they spread at incredible speed before they can be stopped. By the time security systems have recovered, the damage is often done.

A man who was fired by IBM for visiting an adult chat room at work is suing the company for $5 million, claiming he is an Internet addict who deserves treatment and sympathy rather than dismissal. James Pacenza, 58, of Montgomery, says he visits chat rooms to treat traumatic stress incurred in 1969 when he saw his best friend killed during an Army patrol in Vietnam. In papers filed in federal court in White Plains, Pacenza said the stress caused him to become "a sex addict, and with the development of the Internet, an Internet addict." He claimed protection under the American with Disabilities Act. His lawyer, Michael Diederich, says Pacenza never visited pornographic sites at work, violated no written IBM rule and did not surf the Internet any more or any differently than other employees. He also says age discrimination contributed to IBM’s actions. Pacenza, 55 at the time, had been with the company for 19 years and says he could have retired in a year.

Millions of broadband users are at risk for a new kind of attack called drive-by pharming, which targets password weaknesses in the victim’s router, researchers from Symantec Corp. and Indiana University warned Thursday. The threat is greatest for those who don’t change their default passwords after using them to bring the router online. According to an informal study by Indiana University, up to 50% of home broadband users fail to reset the password after installing their router.

The job market for IT pros hasn’t been this robust since the dot-com crash in the late 1990s. Unfortunately for CIOs, this means fierce competition for hiring new staff and holding on to the staff they already have. CIOs are "definitely starting to see a shift," said Deputy CIO Mary Finlay of Partners HealthCare System Inc. in Wellesley, Mass. "While I don’t think we will end up back in the period of the late 1990s, we are moving into another in-demand phase. As IT leaders, we can’t ever take our eyes off the ball [around] recruitment or retention, even during the softer times."

The good news: your CEO thinks you’re doing a good job. The bad news: e has low expectations.# A report released from Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., revealed that while 78% of the CEOs surveyed say they’re happy with the job performance of their CIOs, fewer than half have any confidence in IT as a contributor to business success. The survey of 71 CEOs from firms that had more than $100 million revealed that, if anything, there’s a huge gap in perception, said Laurie Orlov, a Forrester analyst. The question is, does any of this bode well for CIOs?

Billions of emails are sent around the globe each day but are their true meanings getting across? Maybe not. Although emails are quick and easy to send, their lack of facial cues, body language and emotional feedback mean they can be easily misinterpreted. Kristin Byron, of the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University in New York, believes that many email users could be sending and getting mixed messages in emails.

Striking the right balance between corporate IT and shadow IT requires possessing detailed knowledge about how the employees in your company are really accessing and using information. This calls for network monitoring, content monitoring and restraint. Unfortunately, no one vendor can give you everything you need to do these things. This is because different types of workers use different types of data in different ways. Forrester Research breaks the data into three broad categories.