A senior editor for PC World Magazine was fatally shot in his home in what authorities said Wednesday was a drug-related attack. Rex Farrance, 59, the San Francisco, California-based magazine’s senior technical editor, was shot in the chest after four masked men broke into his home Tuesday evening, Pittsburg police said. The assailants also pistol-whipped Farrance’s wife, Lenore Vantosh-Farrance, 56, a registered nurse. She called 911, but the attackers fled before officers arrived. No one has been arrested, officials said.

With the release of 2X ThinClientServer version 4.0, administrators can free themselves from the grueling task of upgrading to the upcoming VISTA activation. This new version of 2X ThinClientServer provides users with Windows applications without the need for VISTA or XP at the desktop. 2X ThinClientServer provides a much needed solution to curb exploding software license, maintenance, hardware and energy costs.

Security experts at RSA have come across a new tool that automatically creates sophisticated phishing sites, a sign that cybercrooks are getting increasingly professional. The tool, which RSA calls the "Universal Man-in-the-Middle Phishing Kit," is available on underground online marketplaces for about $1,000, Jens Hinrichsen, RSA’s product marketing manager for fraud auction, said in an interview Wednesday.

Senate Democrats said on Wednesday they will monitor the possible privacy threats lurking in data-mining programs created by the Bush administration, but avoided criticizing the president directly. By devoting the first Senate Judiciary Committee hearing of the new year to the topic, incoming Chairman Patrick Leahy said he wanted to put the Bush administration on notice: Congress will no longer stand idle while the executive branch continues an "unchecked explosion" in computerized sifting of huge volumes of sensitive personal information, he said. But Leahy and his colleagues said they were interested in collecting information on data mining, not banning the practice.

Adobe Systems has issued updates to fix security flaws in its Reader and Acrobat software that could allow an attacker to remotely commandeer a computer. The vulnerabilities affect Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat Standard, Professional and Elements versions 7.0.8 and earlier, as well as Adobe Acrobat 3D, Adobe said in its advisory. Secunia rated the Reader flaw as "highly critical." The version 7.0.9 updates issued Tuesday are designed to address holes that could allow outsiders to gain access to hard-disk drives via a malicious link that targets PDF files on vulnerable computers.

Institutions for higher education and Not-For-Profit Organizations are experiencing a surge in attempts aimed at hacking their data. The more recent known examples were perpetrated against UCLA, the University of Texas, and Mississippi State University. Acunetix, a leading vendor of Web application security solutions, is offering all American Universities and Not-for-profit Organizations a complimentary Web site audit through its recently launched service, Acunetix SiteAudit.

Microsoft has released high-priority fixes for serious vulnerabilities in its Outlook and Excel applications, but there are no patches in the January batch for known Microsoft Word flaws that are currently under attack. The software maker released four bulletins with patches for a total of 10 vulnerabilities, most rated "critical," but there is no sign of fixes for the known code-execution Word bugs that have been exploited in zero-day attacks since December 2006.

In an effort to combat attention fatigue and information overload, the Burton Group, a Salt Lake City-based IT research firm, released a research report introducing the concept of an Enterprise Attention Management system. According to the report, in the current information economy, knowledge is everything but can be also stress-inducing, from email overload, instant message intrusion on screens and unpredictable interruptions from PDAs and cell phones. An abundance of communication venues can make it difficult to pick out the important parts from the noise.

Middle managers around the world are malcontent, and feel stagnant in their positions, according to the results of an annual survey released by Accenture, the New York-based global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company. In surveying more than 1,400 middle managers in nine countries spanning North America, Europe and Asia, the study found that on average, just four out of 10 respondents said that they were "extremely" or "very" content in their current places of employment. A full 20 percent expressed unwavering dissatisfaction.

Sophos introduced the first version of its new Web content filtering and applications control appliance on Jan. 9, and said that it will offer additional protection against suspicious online content via a partnership with SurfControl. Known as the WS1000, the security appliance marks Sophos’ initial entry into the Web content filtering space. In addition to protecting users and their employers against potentially dangerous URLs, the appliance offers the ability for companies to block certain types of content and applications, such as electronic multimedia files, from being accessed or downloaded without permission.