Boeing has fired an employee whose stolen laptop contained identifying information on 382,000 current and former employees.

The employee, who has not been identified, was fired because he violated company policy by downloading the information onto the laptop and not encrypting it, says Tim Neale, a spokesman for Boeing. The laptop, which had been taken out of the office, was stolen the first week of December, he added.

Source: InformationWeek

Microsoft has quietly released an update for Internet Explorer that fixes a problem with the browser’s phishing shield.

The feature that protects against fraudulent Web sites, new in IE 7, in some cases could bog down computers running Windows, according to an article on Microsoft’s support site published Tuesday. This could happen when a Web page contains many frames or when a user browses many frames in a short time, the company said.

“When you use Windows Internet Explorer 7 to visit a Web page, the computer may respond very slowly as the Phishing Filter evaluates Web page contents,” according to Microsoft. “Internet Explorer 7 evaluates the whole Web page when you browse a frame. Therefore, CPU (central processing unit) usage may be very high.”

Source: News.com

The costliest international warplane project, the F-35 Lightning 2 Joint Strike Fighter, safely completed its first test flight on Friday, advancing a $276.5 billion program financed by the United States and eight other countries.

The test flight achieved most of its goals, but an air data probe used to sense speed and altitude flashed a warning that killed plans to raise the landing gear, officials of Lockheed Martin Corp. said. Lockheed is developing three models of the radar-evading, multi-role fighter jet.

The flight over Fort Worth, Texas, lasted 38 minutes — about two-thirds the 60 minutes or so the Pentagon’s program office had projected earlier this month.

Source: Reuters

The billionaire Russian entrepreneur behind Russia’s biggest vodka maker has paid $3 million to acquire the vodka.com domain, part of a bid to expand into the U.S. market, a broker said on Thursday.

Sedo.com, the Web domain brokering unit that is part of Germany’s United Internet AG, said it had acted as the sales agent in the deal.

Conglomerate Russian Standard Co., controlled by Roustam Tariko, paid $3 million to an undisclosed seller in a deal completed December 4, according to a Sedo.com spokesman. A New York-based spokeswoman for Russian Standard confirmed the $3 million price tag.

Source: Reuters

A computer worm is attacking some business PCs through a flaw in antivirus software by Symantec Corp., a security company warned Friday.

EEye Digital Security, based in Aliso Viejo, Calif., said the worm, dubbed “Big Yellow,” began attacking some computer systems on Thursday - seven months after eEye first discovered the flaw.

Symantec released a patch to address the flaw in May, but it’s up to its corporate customers to install it. Officials at the Cupertino, Calif.-based security software company said Friday it had so far received three reports of systems affected by the worm.

Source: ap