Internet security experts are gathering at a secretive conference later this week to strategize in their fight against cybercriminals. The meeting on Thursday and Friday at Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters is slated to bring together representatives from security companies and government and law enforcement officials, as well as others involved in network security. The agenda focuses on botnets and related topics, seen by experts as a prime threat to the Internet.

SHA-1 is one of the most prevalent forms of a secure hash algorithm used in the legal and security industry. Now that Professor Xiaoyun Wang and her associates in Tsinghua University and Shandong University of Technology have officially cracked the SHA-1 hashing algorithm, the fallout will begin. This won’t actually be due to security concerns for the most part, but the legal ramifications may be severe.

Email is a vital part of the present day business communication for enterprises of all segments and sizes. And it’s of paramount importance to safeguard the email infrastructure from a multitude of threats like Viruses, Worms, Trojans, Backdoors, Spamming and Phishing. MailScan 5.0 for Mail Servers works at "TCP/IP Port level" and hence does not require an additional machine to act as a gateway. It’s powered by the MicroWorld WinSock Layer technology, the first of its kind in the world. Data packets coming at different TCP/IP ports are assembled at the MWL Layer and get scanned for Malware before and after the Mail Server sends or receives mails.

Knocking on the door of its competition at the opening of their annual user event, Microsoft announced new tools to help IBM Lotus Notes/Domino users migrate to the Microsoft fold. At the kickoff of IBM’s annual Lotusphere conference in Orlando, Fla., Microsoft announced a series of tools to help Lotus Notes/Domino customers take advantage of the unified communication and collaboration innovations that are being delivered as part of the recently released Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, the 2007 Microsoft Office system and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 technologies, said Elisa Graceffo, group product manager of Microsoft’s Office Business Platform Group.

Microsoft is expanding its fight against software piracy with a new educational effort that includes comics. The online campaign is meant to tell people the benefits of using properly licensed software. It covers such aspects as awareness of intellectual property rights, risks of using pirated products, proper licensing practices and legalization of fraudulent products.

Visual Integrity Technologies announced availability of a free 30-day trial version of pdf2image 6.5. With it, users can generate high-fidelity images from Adobe Acrobat PDF files to enhance their Microsoft Office documents, presentations, drawings and Web sites. Users of Microsoft Word, Publisher, PowerPoint, Visio, Publisher, and FrontPage can significantly improve the quality of their output by converting their PDF files by into the proper format and resolution to suit the requirements of their Web site, in-house printing project or professional publishing job.

A group representing French- and German-language Belgian newspaper publishers has sent legal warnings to Yahoo about its display of archived news articles, the search company has confirmed. Copiepresse, which has previously tussled with Google and Microsoft’s MSN, has been leading the battle against search engines that publish news articles and photos via their news aggregators and search engine results. The group argues that the practice violates copyright laws, even if sites link to the publisher’s Web site.

Microsoft will make its new Windows Vista operating system available for sale and download online, marking a new step for the software company, which has previously sold Windows only on packaged discs or pre-loaded on computers. A relatively low number of computer users are likely to get Vista by downloading it from the Internet. But the mere availability indicates that Microsoft is fiddling with distribution methods for the extremely profitable franchise at the core of its business.

The U.S. Senate has rejected a proposal that may have required some political bloggers to register as lobbyists or face prison time. By a 55-43 vote, the senators approved an amendment that dropped a controversial section dictating such regulations from a massive piece of federal lobbying legislation. Seven Democrats joined 48 Republicans voting in favor of the amendment, which was proposed by Sen. Bob Bennett (R-Utah). No Republicans voted against the measure. The Senate went on to vote 96-2 to approve the entire lobbying package, as amended. The provision removed from that bill, Section 220, would have required certain people engaged in "grassroots lobbying" to register with the government or face civil and criminal penalties, including up to 10 years in prison.

SPAMfighter, well-known for protecting millions of computers worldwide from unwanted spam is now filtering spam, and fighting viruses for thousands of firms all over the world with the SPAMfighter Exchange Module (SEM). The SPAMfighter Exchange Module offers businesses an effective spam filter, as well as an anti-virus program for all users on their Microsoft Exchange. SEM has recently been updated to filter out the newest forms of spam mails. Recent trends show that spammers are investing more and more in the technological side of spam mails. They are creating spam mails which will push past the spam filters, and into users inboxes. However, SPAMfighter has also focused on these new trends, and has worked day and night to keep up with the spammers making sure to ensure SEM users the highest filter rate.