Unwilling to wait any longer, James Kim left his wife and two young children in their frozen, snowbound car and set off into the wilderness to seek help, wearing only tennis shoes, a sweater and a jacket. Now he is the one who needs help. A helicopter spotted his wife, Kati Kim, 30, waving an umbrella Monday afternoon. She and her daughters Penelope, 4, and Sabine, 7 months, were airlifted to a hospital and are in good condition. The fate of her husband is unknown. Trained dogs, horse patrols and a helicopter with heat-seeking capability were to join other helicopters, snowmobiles and foot patrols Tuesday for the 35-year-old. Trackers followed his footprints until dark Monday night.

IBM plans to acquire privately held Consul Risk Management to enhance the compliance and security auditing capabilities of its Tivoli systems management software family. IBM said Tuesday it expects to close its purchase of Consul in the first quarter of 2007. At that point, Consul will become part of IBM’s Tivoli Software business unit. IBM didn’t provide any financial details on the proposed transaction.

Washington’s attorney general has settled the first case prosecuted under the state’s 2005 Computer Spyware Act. The settlement announced Monday is with antispyware vendor Secure Computer. The White Plains, N.Y., software company was accused of marketing its product via deceptive spam and pop-up ads, which offered free spyware scans that always detected a problem with the computer that was scanned. The company and its president, Paul Burke, will pay US$725,000 in legal fees and $200,000 in penalties, and will reimburse Washington state customers $75,000, said Paula Selis, senior counsel with the attorney general’s office.

Recent studies indicate that when customers or potential customers contact an online organization, 80% prefer communicating by email over phone and over 50% will not do business with a company if they do not receive an adequate response to their email within 24 hours. The average response time to a customer email inquiry is 72 hours. Most Online organizations communicate regularly with customers and clients by email, but few provide a level of email customer service that satisfies their clientele.

A malicious video on MySpace.com pages changes people’s profiles when played, embedding itself and adding links to fraudulent Web sites, experts have warned. The video is a rigged QuickTime file that exploits a MySpace vulnerability and support for JavaScript in Apple Computer’s embedded media player, Web security firm Websense said in an alert posted on Friday. When played by a MySpace user, the video adds itself to the user’s MySpace page and replaces the links on the user’s profile with links to phishing Web sites, Websense said. Phishing sites are fraudulent sites that attempt to trick people into giving up sensitive information such as log-in credentials.

A Romanian man was indicted Thursday for allegedly breaking into more than 150 U.S. government computers. The indictment charges Victor Faur, 26, of Arad, Romania, with leading a hacking group called the "WhiteHat Team," according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. The group allegedly hacked into the government systems because of their reputation as some of the most secure in the world.

SCO took big hits–both in the courts, and in the stock market. Regardless of what SCO’s management decides to do, the company’s stockholders seem to have finally had enough of the troubled company. First, on Nov. 29, U.S. District Court Judge Dale Kimball affirmed Magistrate Judge Brooke Wells’s June 28, 2006 Order. In that order, Wells dismissed 188 of SCO’s claimed 294 examples of IBM contributing Unix code to Linux.

The themes of the 2006 IT professional world could be summed up as the following: H-1B visas, certifications, a job market that either rocked or was awful, and the Baby Boomer-Generation Y gap in the workplace. eWEEK caught up with IT workforce experts and asked them what they had on their minds and dockets for the coming year. Many of the issues sounded surprisingly familiar but all agreed that if there is one thing that couldn’t be watched closely enough, it was the release of Microsoft’s Vista.

ComputerJobs.com announced that it was acquired by JobServe.com, an Essex, England-based Internet recruiting site. ComputerJobs.com was founded in 1995 "by and for information technology professionals," according to its mission statement, focusing its computer-related job opportunities and career-related content into 18 vertical skill sets with more than 19 metropolitan markets. It boasts job listings from more than 4,000 companies, including IBM, Microsoft, Coca-Cola and Deloitte and Touche. In its 11-year history, the company says it has helped more than 1.5 million IT pros locate jobs.

IBM is gearing up to offer new blade servers and switches that the company said will improve the ability for the telecommunications industry to offer voice over IP, Internet protocol TV and security. The company announced that it would begin to offer the BladeCenter HT system, which is designed to hold up under the rugged environments in which many telecom systems are housed. IBM had previously developed eServer BladeCenter T servers in 2004. The newer HT models are being touted as a better way to deal with telecom products that demand more broadband processing power like VOIP and IPTV.