California Attorney General Bill Lockyer may file criminal charges within a week in its investigation of tactics used by Hewlett-Packard in an inquiry into boardroom leaks. Lockyer said in a televised interview Tuesday that his office has enough evidence to file charges against HP officials and outside contractors.

IBM has started selling blade servers that use the nine-core Cell processor originally developed for video games. The QS20 blades, each with two 3.2GHz Cell Broadband Engine processors, are good for high-performance computing tasks such as seismic research, encryption, digital image rendering and military surveillance. An IBM representative wouldn’t say how much the blades cost, but a customer announcement said they run $18,995 each. The systems are expected to be available Sep. 29, with a $1,950 InfiniBand high-speed network option arriving Oct. 27.

The volume of required business passwords overwhelms users and hinders IT security efforts, according to a study released by RSA Security, based in Bedford, MA. One quarter of the 1,300 responding business professionals reported password-related security breaches. The study asserts that the burden of multiple passwords poses significant security risks and encourages user behavior that endangers compliance initiatives. The surveyed users said they felt swamped by the number of passwords necessary to access business applications and Web sites and portals, in some cases leading to precarious behaviors.

Last June, we came across a blog posting by Robert Harbols that seemed to perfectly touch on an issue near and dear to any IT manager’s heart: motivating geeks. While we rarely reprint material published elsewhere, this article was so perfectly relevant to our DominoPower audience that we asked Robert for permission to republish. You can read it here.

Read this DominoPower article.

Juniper Networks and Symantec will jointly work on unified threat management and intrusion detection and prevention products, and in the long term will extend their partnership to antivirus and threat detection. The pairing, announced Tuesday, will first aim to enhance Juniper’s UTM and IDP offerings, with its Integrated Security Platforms integrated with Symantec’s antispam IDP/IPS (intrusion protection systems) signatures, vulnerability information and research.

Two Moroccan men have been jailed for releasing the Zotob computer worm, which wreaked havoc on an estimated 250,000 Windows PCs last year. A third man has been charged with financing the attack, which shut down PCs in a number of major corporations in mid-August 2005. The worm primarily affected Windows 2000 systems, taking advantage of a bug in the operating system’s Plug and Play service that had been patched by Microsoft just days before the outbreak.

An Australian man under investigation for illegal spamming sent more than 2 billion emails promoting Viagra in a year, an official said Wednesday. Experts say that’s a drop in the ocean compared to the number of spam emails sent globally each year, and the system he used probably wasn’t very sophisticated. Under Australia’s Spam Act of 2003, it is illegal for Australian residents to be involved in the sending of unsolicited commercial emails, even if they are generated from outside the country.

The number of brands exploited by online con artists grew to a record 154 in July, according to a report from the Anti-Phishing Working Group. The study, released on Monday, showed that the number of brands under attack from phishing was up 20 percent from June and 12 percent from the previous record in May. The APWG findings indicate that scammers are no longer content to exploit only the best-known brands.

The first set of results from CIO Insight’s latest annual Security Survey provides an update from the war zone that is IT security. There’s plenty of bad news: over half of companies over $1 billion report security breaches in the past 12 months, and 45 percent have been targeted by organized criminals. Penetration by spyware and viruses remain problems, but they’re not the only ones: nearly half of all companies that have had security breaches say equipment containing company data has been lost or stolen. Many other organizations besides the Veterans Administration and Fidelity Investments have lost laptops containing sensitive personal data.

Hewlett-Packard Chairman Patricia Dunn, who launched an investigation into media leaks that resulted in a firestorm of controversy, has agreed to resign her post following a meeting of the company’s board of directors. The board has appointed CEO and President Mark Hurd to take over for Dunn, who will continue to serve as chairman through the company’s Jan. 18, 2007 scheduled meeting. After that point, Dunn will remain on the board as a director.