Cheap calls
From tomorrow, customers of BT's Business Plan package will pay a maximum of 10p for calls of up to an hour to the US. A 20p maximum will apply to similar calls to 22 other countries, including Australia, Germany and Ireland. Research commissioned by BT from consultancy Deloitte & Touche says this move makes the UK's dominant telecoms provider cheaper than most of its competitors for an average business, with only WorldCom costing less.
Denial of attacks
The Home Office plans to revise the Computer Misuse Act, which was drafted in the late 1980s. The department says the act covers the majority of attacks on information systems, but amendments may be needed to deal with new threats such as denial of service attacks. These are a by-product of the internet's popularisation, as they tend to rely on using viruses to take over numerous online computers, which then flood a web-server with requests. This effectively puts the website offline.
New frame
Unisys has confirmed its position as one of the few remaining manufacturers of mainframes with the release of the ClearPath Plus Libra 185. The Libra features support for both Microsoft.Net and Sun's Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) as part of its Enterprise Application Environment software development toolkit. This will allow customers to define business processes and automatically generate applications in Cobol, .Net and J2EE. Unisys claims a five-fold increase in data throughput over its previous mainframes and has made provision for metered performance provisioning. www.unisys.com
Microsoft branded
Microsoft is the world's second-most valuable brand, worth $65bn (£40bn), beaten only by Coca-Cola. IBM took third place, with a valuation of $52bn, in figures estimated by the agency Interbrand for Business Week magazine. But brands don't buy love. In a US Harris Poll last week Sony came top of its survey of America's favourite brand for the fourth year running, with Microsoft fifth. Dell took third in the survey of 879 Americans. http://www.brandchannel.com/images/home/bgb_2003.pdf
Windows attacks
Security experts think Windows computers could soon be the victim of a worm attack like the Code Red incident, perhaps this weekend. The Chinese X Focus security group has circulated source code that exploits a buffer overflow flaw in the Windows implementation of RPC (remote procedure call). A researcher has improved it to work with more versions of Windows. Microsoft published a bulletin about it, plus fixes, on July 16, but most users have not installed it. According to a Cert advisory, "blocking access to TCP & UDP ports 135, 139, and 445... will limit your exposure to attacks". Cert has also published a note about security flaws in a Windows DirectX library file, quartz.dll, used to play Midi music files. A patch is available from MS03-030.asp. www.microsoft.com/technet
www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2003-16.html
www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2003-18.html
Oracle flaws
Oracle has released patches for two high-risk vulnerabilities in its E-Business Suite to prevent malicious code being used to view application configuration data. A buffer overflow problem in the software gateway allowing browser access to Oracle reports and log files could allow attackers to install their code. Flaws in Java Server Pages (JSPs) in E-Business Suite's Application Self-Service Framework Test Suite could render configuration information visible. The patches are available through Oracle's Metalink service. http://otn.oracle.com/deploy/security/alerts.htm
BI buys
The business intelligence (BI) market is contracting, with two recent acquisitions. Business Objects is making an $820m (£500m) bid for Crystal Decisions to make the merged company more competitive with other BI specialists. Both companies specialise in decision support, statistical analysis and data mining. One of Crystal's customers is Hyperion, which has purchased Brio Software for $142m (£87m). According to market researcher Datamonitor, the European market for BI software could be worth £3.5bn in 2005. www.businessobjects.com
www.hyperion.com/news_events/eda.cfm
Self service
The SIM Group, an independent software testing service provider, claims that tests carried out over the past year show that 97% of web applications have serious security flaws. The disclosure stems from the company's investigations of web services available on 300 sites. SIM's fears are supported by a report from Gartner, which states that 70% of hacking attacks are made at the application level.
http://www.simgroup.com/Consultancy/websec2.html
