Beginning on November 24 and continuing for less than a week, bad guys loaded up more than 40,000 Web pages with malicious software and thousands of common search terms. They then employed an automated network of malware-infected computers–known as a botnet–to link to those sites in blog-comment spam and other places. The mentions elevated the position of the poisoned sites in search results, often to the first page.

The malicious sites had no useful information. Instead, a simple click on a link to such a site in the search results was enough to launch attacks against your PC. If the attack found any of a number of vulnerabilities in a range of programs, it would load.

Greek police said on Friday they have arrested a man suspected of selling corporate secrets from France’s Dassault Group, including data on weapons systems. "This 58-year-old mathematician was wanted since 2002 after Dassault contacted Greek authorities," a police official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters.

"He is responsible for causing damages in excess of $361 million to the company and he has sold this corporate data, including information on weapons systems, to about 250 buyers through the Internet," the official said. Police suspect the man of selling the data to buyers in Germany, Italy, France, South Africa, Brazil, as well as countries in Asia and the Balkans.

ExtraLabs Software announced the release of RSS Wizard 3. RSS Wizard is an HTML to RSS converter than can generate the RSS feed out of virtually any Web page without having to edit it first. RSS Wizard generates RSS 2.0 feeds and allows you to create, edit and publish an unlimited number of RSS channels. The program has a great collection of features such as the built-in scheduler, autodetecting of RSS tags, command line support, XML editor and built-in FTP client.

A new study confirms what a great many people in IT already suspected: Companies of all sizes are vulnerable to costly and damaging email outages because they trust their messaging infrastructure to a single server and do not have an adequate backup and recovery plan in case of a disaster.

ApplicationContinuity.org surveyed 434 IT professionals responsible for email continuity in small (0-99 employees), medium (100-999 employees) and large (1,000 or more employees) enterprises. ResearchCorp.org provided the analysis.

The goal was to determine whether companies are prepared to deliver email continuity–particularly for Microsoft Exchange–and whether companies have a plan in place to secure email communication during a local or sitewide failure or downtime event.

Over the past few months, Brenda Coxe has been writing a series of articles on Internet safety. Although she’s aimed them at grandparents (probably the most vulnerable group online these days), she recommends everyone read these articles. Internet safety is too important. In this article’s title, she uses the term "compromised" because there are so many different things that can happen online if you are not careful. This article will help keep you safe.

Read this OutlookPower article.

Microsoft released a refresh of its first service pack for Vista to beta testers on Thursday, indicating the final release might be near. On Thursday, beta users of SP1 received an e-mail from Microsoft alerting them that Vista SP1 refresh 2 is available for download. Microsoft released the latest build, which addressed a small number of bugs that testers encountered in the previous version, to around 15,000 beta users, the company said.

Microsoft issued Vista SP1 Release Candidate in December and a refresh earlier this month. It has said that the final Vista SP1 will be available to the public during the first quarter of this year, with some reports suggesting that it might come out as soon as Feb. 15.

This week analysts at Kaspersky Lab released a top ten listof "malware miscellany" from last month. The Malware Miscellany list takes a slightly out-of-the-box look at December’s top worms and viruses through categories ranging from "greediest Trojan" to "most common virus/worm family" to the "stealthiest malicious program." Included in the list are links to quick-and-dirty encyclopedia listings for each piece of malware, which provide a short technical description, other known "aliases" and types of behavior.

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the Mozilla browser, the most successful open-source product created from a previous commercial product. For this anniversary, eWeek is taking a look back at some of the key moments in Mozilla’s history.

A new patent filed by Microsoft describing plans to develop a system that would allow managers to monitor workers’ physiological states through their computers with the ostensible goal of helping them if they become frustrated has left observers feeling anything but reassured.

The patent hopes to address what Microsoft sees as "relatively inefficient" communications between humans and machines; none of them automatically adapt to the user. Microsoft hopes to make these interactions more seamless by providing assistance "in the form of answering questions, providing guidance to the user as the user completes the activity, or completing the activity such as in the case of taking on an assigned activity," reads the patent application.

Officials say the real power of virtualization comes when companies implement an integrated strategy across their IT infrastructures. The potential for IT to drive business success has never been greater, but the complexity of IT has also never been higher, Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Microsoft’s server and tools business, will tell customers Jan. 22.

Muglia penned an executive email: "Harnessingthe Power of Virtualization for Dynamic IT," which was sent Jan. 21 to customers, partners in the industry and others who have signed up to receive these periodic emails from company executives.