A new campaign of the password-stealing Zeus trojan is targeting workers from government and military departments in the United States and United Kingdom, according to security researchers at Websense. The trojan is being distributed through spoofed emails claiming to come from the U.S. National Intelligence Council. The bogus messages contain subject lines such as "Report of the National Intelligence Council." The emails aim to lure users into downloading a document about the "2020 project," which actually is Zeus. — AM

Oracle on Thursday released a fix for a zero-day vulnerability in its WebLogic Node Manager. The publicly released bug can allow an attacker to fully compromise a targeted server on Windows, according to an Oracle blog post. The patch does not appear to be related to researcher David Litchfield's talk this week at the Black Hat conference in Washington, D.C., where he revealed how zero-day vulnerabilities in the Oracle 11g database could be used to bypass security and take complete control of the popular software. — DK

A hacker recently attacked the payroll processing firm Ceridian Corp. of Bloomington, Minn. and gained access to sensitive information of employees working at 1,900 companies nationwide.

One of the great unintended consequences of my job, having covered the IT security space for nearly four years, is my great inability to accurately gauge the awareness that mainstream America has for cyber-risks.