Anti-spam forces must have hit a nerve with their adversaries.

As of the evening of June 7, anti-spam groups Spamhaus, SURBL (Spam URI Realtime Blocklists), URIBL (Realtime URI Blacklist) and others have been under a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack, according to the ISC (Internet Storm Center), which is run by the SANS Institute (SysAdmin, Audit, Network, Security).

This is an extremely serious issue, as these types of attacks have succeeded in bringing down and, in some cases, permanently knocking out important weapons in the fight against spammers.

Both Microsoft and IBM are chasing the same goal of empowering their customers to have more agile, dynamic businesses.

At the company’s TechEd conference, Microsoft officials talked about giving customers agility in creating applications and providing services for their constituents and their own businesses. They demonstrated how Microsoft’s application platform can be used to enable customers to collaborate better and to respond more quickly to changes, as in SOAs. Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business, called this "dynamic IT."

Separately, at its Rational Software Development Conference June 10-14, IBM will announce a slew of new and enhanced developer tools to help customers not only develop applications faster and better but also help customers better manage and support projects throughout the development life cycle.

AmberPoint announced the next release of its industry-leading runtime governance solutions for service oriented architecture systems. The version 6 releases of AmberPoint SOA Management System and AmberPoint SOA Validation System deliver vital new capabilities for understanding and controlling heterogeneous applications. These new products are outgrowths of AmberPoint’s close work with industry partners including BEA, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, TIBCO and others. With its new products, AmberPoint introduces capabilities that extend the breadth, depth and ease of real-time visibility into service networks, while also providing more comprehensive control.

Niels Provos, one of the brains behind Google’s big anti-malware push, has released a new version of the open-source SpyBye, adding a key new feature to allow it to be used as proxy for regular Web browsing.

SpyBye, a free utility that helps Web masters determine if their Web pages are hosting browser exploits, can now work within the browser to trigger a warning notification and links to an in-depth analysis of the suspicious page.

Back in November, a mystery company filed a legal complaint about Windows Vista. The company has been revealed to be Google, in a breach of legal protocol.

What is the complaint, and how do we know Google is the mystery company? Seeing as how the information had been leaked anyway and was public, a Microsoft lawyer confirmed Google’s identity. However, Microsoft hasn’t seen the complaint but knows some of the contents based on questions received by the technical committee. Google could not be reached for comment or confirmation.

Google’s privacy practices are the worst among the Internet’s top destinations, according to a watchdog group seeking to intensify the recent focus on how the online search leader handles personal information about its users.

In a report released Saturday, London-based Privacy International assigned Google its lowest possible grade. The category is reserved for companies with "comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy."

Yahoo has issued a critical security patch for Messenger to address zero-day exploits that take advantage of vulnerabilities in its Webcam ActiveX controls.

The exploits to instant messaging surfaced Wednesday, less than 24 hours after the vulnerabilities were first reported to Yahoo by eEye Digital Security.

DataNumen has announced Advanced Outlook Repair 1.4. This application lets anyone recover the content of Microsoft Outlook (97 and up) with remarkable ease. Using advanced technologies, Advanced Outlook Repair scans the damaged Outlook .pst (personal folder) file, recovers mail messages and other data you keep in your Outlook client.

Advanced Outlook Repair has a complete set of features typical for the best recovery software in its category, but what sets it apart from the rest is the technology used to recover data. It guarantees that for many PST file data corruption cases Advanced Outlook Repair will be able to recover more data, much faster and more accurately than other recovery tools.

Microsoft will send out six security bulletins, four of them for problems rated "critical," the company’s highest severity rating, on Patch Tuesday, June 12. All four of the most serious vulnerabilities, in Windows and in IE, can lead to systems getting hijacked.

Three of the critical problems are in Windows; one is in Internet Explorer, one is in Outlook Express and Windows Mail, and there is one "important" fix for Visio. Also, a moderate bug has been found in Windows.

Researchers at eEye Digital Security are reporting multiple vulnerabilities in Yahoo Messenger they say hackers can use to remotely execute code.

Yahoo spokesperson Terrell Karlsten confirmed the company is looking into a buffer overflow issue in an Active X control.