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The decade-old software provider, based in Pasadena, Calif., on Jan. 19 announced Version 4 of its EnCase eDiscovery platform. EnCase provides legal and IT teams with an integrated software package that includes all the necessary functions for in-house electronic discovery, such as legal hold, precollection analytics, and identification, preservation and collection. The latest news is that Guidance, in its Version 4, has added a couple of other important features: processing, analysis and early case assessment, and first-pass review.

[A]ddressing Stuxnet goes beyond using quality security controls, said Mark Weatherford, vice president and chief security officer at NERC. The industry, he said, needs to demand higher quality software that is free from defects. "This is not an indictment on [the] control system industry; it's an indictment on the IT business in general," Weatherford said. "We're still seeing products that come out that are susceptible to vulnerabilities that quite frankly have been in the wild for quite some time."

Malware writers seem to be targeting the Task Manager with increasing frequency. McAfee's Avert Labs wrote in its blog yesterday of the discovery of a new Trojan it dubbed QTaskMgr-1, which crawls into the registry and disables the Task Manager, Windows Update and Internet Explorer tool bars. Hitting Ctrl+Alt+Del will activate the Windows Security menu, but all functions including Change Password and Lock Computer are disabled.

In reviewing several security articles and blogs about malware characteristics and workarounds, I see a recurring piece of advice: Don't click on any popup or dialog window; instead use the Windows Task Manager to end offending processes. It's good advice, since malware writers-particularly those spreading scareware or bogus applications designed to trick computer users into buying useless security software-are gaming the dialog windows. Users are often presented with the typical option, such as "do you wish to proceed? Yes/No." Hitting either button or even the "X" window closing button will initiate a background process as if the user agreed. Using the Task Manager is the safe way of disabling these processes to allow the anti-virus software to scan and remove the offending code. Or so we think. Malware writers seem to be targeting the Task Manager with increasing frequency. McAfee's Avert Labs wrote in its blog yesterday of the discovery of a new Trojan it dubbed QTaskMgr-1, which crawls into the registry and disables the Task Manager, Windows Update and Internet Explorer tool bars. Hitting Ctrl+Alt+Del will activate the Windows Security menu, but all functions including Change Password and Lock Computer are disabled.

Such software, often referred to as "scareware," has gotten more attention in the past year as scammers continue to enjoy success tricking users into shelling out big bucks. In a report titled "Report on Rogue Security Software," Symantec officials uncovered that sales affiliates were pulling in staggering amounts of money.

VMware and Sun Microsystems are working together to deliver a high-performance virtual desktop solution across wide area networks with a new integrated solution that includes the VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) platform and Sun Microsystems' Sun Ray™ software and virtual display clients. The solution utilizes Sun's Appliance Link Protocol™ (ALP), which outperforms other display protocols when used to deliver virtual desktops over networks with high latency. Customer tests show dramatic increases in performance when using VMware VDI with Sun ALP to deliver complete desktop environments in a WAN deployment.

I'm also an advocate of third-party software that helps companies manage elevated accounts. I often run into Cyber-Ark's privilege identity manager solutions. It's pretty cool stuff and perfect for managing elevated accounts. Admin accounts can be locked into a digital vault, then protected by granular policies that enforce rules and checkout procedures in order for an elevated account to be used. One of my favorite features is the one-time-use passwords, where the password is changed for each user and occasion. You can also easily enable auditing of who used what accounts when.

As such, I've frequently advised small business owners to avoid banking on Windows systems, since all of the malicious software currently being used by these criminals to steal e-banking credentials simply fails to run on anything other than Windows. What's more, the tools these crooks are using - mainly the Zeus Trojan - almost always outpace anti-virus detection at least by a few days, and by then it's usually too late.

The NSW Department of Education is using asset-tracking software, RFID tags, and BIOS-embedded filtering smarts to roll out 240,000 netbook computers into what CIO Stephen Wilson calls "the most hostile environment you can roll computers into" - the local high school.

New software developed at the Georgia Institute for Technology can identify spam before it hits the mail server. The system, known as SNARE (Spatio-temporal Network-level Automatic Reputation Engine), scores each incoming e-mail based on a variety of new criteria that can be gleaned from a single packet of data. The researchers involved say the automated system puts less of a strain on the network and minimizes the need for human intervention while achieving the same accuracy as traditional spam filters.

A panel of CIOs from state government, health care and the insurance sector told cloud providers from Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT), Google (NSDQ:GOOG), Amazon (NSDQ:AMZN) and Joyent on Thursday that they no longer need to be sold on the benefits of cloud infrastructure -- they get them. But that doesn't mean they're ready to trust the cloud, either.