Security: A virus set to strike today is now considered unlikely to cause significant damage, according to F-Secure. Known by several names — Blackdoom, Nyxem, Kama Sutra and Mywife — the virus was scheduled to begin deleting files on infected machines, but as of early Friday there were no reports of data being wiped out. The Mozilla Corporation, meanwhile, has issued an upgrade of its Firefox browser, 1.5.0.1, which brings with it critical security updates, as well as a number of stability fixes. Columnists’ corner: Security Adviser Roger Grimes on winning the password probability game. The topic crept into his head, of all places, in the shower and left him wondering whether any password-guessing tool uses scientific password frequency analysis. “Forget malicious hackers; scientifically derived data could be used to help the good guys — police, anti-child-pornography enforcement, armed services, and so on — crack the bad guys’ passwords more quickly,” Grimes writes. The news beat: An IDC report finds that IT executives are optimistic about spending, and those polled expect 7 percent growth over the next 12 months. RIM wins patent case in the UK, and IBM targets Russian developers. Special report: It’s no secret that data integration is one of IT’s harshest pain points. In Mastering enterprise data, we take a look at how to whip IT data into shape. Service-oriented architectures can help, and so can finding a home for metadata. Security