A former UBS PaineWebber employee was sentenced to eight years in prison on Wednesday for planting a computer logic bomb on company networks and betting its stock would go down. The investment scheme backfired when UBS stock remained stable after the computer attack and Roger Duronio lost more than $23,000. A federal judge in New Jersey sentenced Duronio, 64, to 97 months in prison and ordered him to make $3.1 million in restitution to his former employer, the U.S. attorney’s office said in a statement. Duronio was convicted on July 19 of one count of securities fraud and one count of computer fraud in the 2002 case.

Two members of Congress want Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd to explain why he sold HP stock just prior to the company’s acknowledgment that it had spied on employees, board members and journalists. In a letter sent Tuesday to Hurd, Reps. Bart Stupak and John Dingell, both Michigan Democrats, asked the CEO why he sold $1.4 million worth of stock options on August 25, the same day he was questioned by HP attorneys about the company’s investigation into news leaks. The congressmen note in their letter that the sale did not seem to be part of a scheduled stock sale. Executives often arrange in advance to sell stock, and the timing of such transactions typically follows a pattern.

Symantec has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit that alleges eight businesses and seven individuals reaped an estimated $15 million in profits from pirated copies of its most popular security software. The lawsuit, filed in a U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, comes after an investigation of more than two years, the company said. The lawsuit names ANYI, SILI, GT Micro, ASP Solutions, Mark Ma, Mike Lee, John Zhang and other affiliates as defendants. Symantec alleges the parties engaged in trademark infringement, copyright infringement, fraud, unfair competition and false advertising.

Dell has named former EDS executive Steve Schuckenbrock to lead the computer maker’s $5 billion a year global services organization, the latest in a string of new management hires. Separately, Dell said it was restructuring its product groups into two segments–business and consumer–instead of along product lines–enterprise and client, as it has long been organized. Senior management remains in place.

Hewlett-Packard announced Dec. 12 it will acquire Knightsbridge Solutions for an undisclosed amount within the next 30 days. Knightsbridge is a Chicago-based services company focused on the information management areas of business intelligence, data warehousing, data integration and information quality.

IBM and Yahoo! have introduced new, free enterprise search software with Web search services powered by Yahoo! that enables departments and businesses of all sizes to quickly and easily find, access and capitalize on information stored within organizations and across the Web. IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition is a no-cost, entry level enterprise search product developed to help eliminate financial and technology barriers to intranet and Web search. Unlike other enterprise search solutions that can cost thousands of dollars to purchase and implement, the new offering from IBM with Web search services powered by Yahoo! can be downloaded for free and is simple to install and use with existing hardware.

Computer hackers will open a new front in the multi-billion pound "cyberwar" in 2007, targeting mobile phones, instant messaging and community Web sites such as MySpace, security experts predict. As people grow wise to email scams, criminal gangs will find new ways to commit online fraud, sell fake goods or steal corporate secrets.

IBM Research is working on delivering a middleware system that will enable users to tap into the data on mobile devices to create a virtually unlimited pool of data and provide essentially infinite access to the Internet, the company said. Stefan Schoenauer, a researcher at the company’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., said IBM Research, as part of the company’s IBM Extreme Blue program, has developed a prototype of a data-sharing middleware platform for mobile devices that will enable heterogeneous devices, regardless of their operating systems or hardware, to access the network via various communication modes, including device-to-device direct communications.

In one of the largest known security breaches at a university, the database at the University of California, Los Angeles has been broken into, exposing the private information of about 800,000 people. Administrators discovered November 21 that the database had been compromised, according to a letter dated Tuesday that was posted to the university’s Web site (PDF here). The hacker had exploited a previously undetected software flaw and gained access to the database from October 2005 until the discovery, Norman Abrams, acting UCLA chancellor, said in the letter.

SAP is looking to an aggressive midmarket push to help triple its customer base over the next four years and stave off competition from the likes of Oracle and Microsoft. In his keynote speech Dec. 4 at the company’s annual analyst conference, Shai Agassi, president of SAP’s Product and Technology Group and a member of its executive board, said he asked his team to "shoot for the moon" when describing his vision for a transformational midmarket suite.