Junior sales staff are most likely to be responsible for technological security breaches at work, according to a British survey.

The poll of 942 IT managers found that salesmen aged between 26 and 35 are most at risk from computer viruses and other online attacks.

Internet security firm MessageLabs, which commissioned the survey, said sales staff were too busy to worry about protecting themselves and their company from fraud.
“They are the natural multi-taskers,” MessageLabs’ Chief Security Analyst Mark Sunner told Reuters. “They’re going to be on the phone, browsing the Web and using instant messaging all at the same time.

Google Inc. has signed deals to supply software to students and government workers in two East African nations, in a bid to put them on the technical footing of more developed countries.

The Web search leader said on Monday it had agreed to separate partnerships with the Rwandan Ministry of Infrastructure and the Kenya Education Network (KENET), which represents students and staff at 32 universities in Kenya.

Under the deals to supply Google Apps software, students in both African countries along with Rwandan government officials will have access to free communications tools including e-mail, shared calendars, instant messaging and word processing.

Last year, Mountain View, California-based Google entered the business software market with a basic set of free programs delivered over the Web. It then began offering last month a subscription service to companies who pay for extra features and technical support.

The investors and founders of YouTube received hundreds of millions of dollars in Google shares as a result of the deal between the two companies late last year, according to new documents.

The big payout was revealed Wednesday in a regulatory filing Google made with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The paperwork offered a more detailed account than previously disclosed of the sale’s beneficiaries.

The $1.76 billion acquisition of the video-sharing Web site was the biggest in Google’s history, and took place less than two years after YouTube was founded. The startup had about 70 employees when the deal was announced in October.

In total, online search leader Google Inc. registered about 3.23 million Class A shares to issue to former YouTube stockholders, according to the filing.

YouTube’s three founders and Sequoia Capital, its main financial backer, received the biggest windfalls.

Legitimate e-mail now constitutes a rounding error when compared with spam, thanks to a standing army of more than a million zombie PCs waging war on in-boxes worldwide on any given day.

Some 94% of all e-mail last December was spam, according to Postini’s annual communications intelligence report, which the managed e-mail security company released today.

In 2006, the volume of spam rose 147% by Postini’s measure. The company attributes the surge in spam to PCs that have been commandeered by cybercriminals without the knowledge of their owners.

In and of itself, this sounds like the same mixture of marketing and reporting that messaging security firms have engaged in for years. And it is that. But that doesn’t diminish the real difficulties businesses face in coping with spam.

A company that helps advertisers connect with bloggers willing to write about their products for payment will now require disclosures amid criticism and a regulatory threat.

Before this week, advertisers were barred by PayPerPost Inc. from telling bloggers they can’t disclose the sponsorship, but bloggers were able to decide on their own whether or not to do so. Under the new policy, bloggers must disclose that they are accepting payment, either in the write-up or in a general disclosure policy on the blogger’s Web journal.

“Ever since we launched, there’s been a lot of controversy about disclosure,” said Ted Murphy, PayPerPost’s chief executive.

Besides other bloggers questioning the ethics of receiving payments without disclosure, the Federal Trade Commission said in a Dec. 7 staff opinion that failure to disclose could, in some cases, violate consumer-protection laws on deception. The FTC did not single out PayPerPost or say whether it would launch any investigation.

David Sifry, founder of the blog search site Technorati, praised PayPerPost’s move.