Spam tide drowns email

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Spam has accounted for 38 percent of the 31 billion emails sent each day in North America in 2004, up from 24 percent in 2002, the market researcher said.

Improved content filtering and anti-spam tools will help fight the problem, as will the growing use of alternative communications means, such as video conferencing and instant messaging software.

The ever-increasing intrusion by spam is forcing users and IT staff to spend extra time and energy to identify and delete such spurious email, which can be entry points for viruses, worms and offensive content.

Email is still the most preferred form of communication — business or otherwise — over the Internet.

According to IDC, the volume of email sent annually worldwide exceeded one exabyte, or one billion gigabytes, for the first time last year. IDC researcher Mark Levitt said the biggest challenge is to use the lessons learned so far and the investments made to help screen all inbound and outbound emails without compromising worker efficiency, corporate governance and regulatory compliance requirements.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/networks/0,39020345,39165256,00.htm

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Wi-Fi Wall Jacks To Enable Wireless Grid

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The technology will lower Wi-Fi installation costs and let businesses more easily deploy a high-capacity wireless network.
“What Aruba does is allow you to put in an access point in a matter of moments,” says CraigThat will let businesses install more wireless access points, creating a “wireless grid” that will result in a network with a greater data-carrying capacity than a conventional wireless network, says Merwyn Andrade, Aruba’s chief technology officer.

Ortronics initially plans to offer two types of Wi-Jacks.
One is a device that plugs into the network port (powered by the network) and the other is a jack with the WiFi built-in
[Auditors review your physical review processes and procedures for sites].

http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=45400023

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BMC update aims to nip downtime in the bud

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“What BMC is proposing is a better way to manage applications, by creating models of how the application depends on the infrastructure,” said Jean-Pierre Garbani, an analyst at Forrester Research. “With a model, IT people can see that one component is not behaving normally…It’s a way to speed up and make problem management more intelligent,” Garbani said.

On Tuesday, the software maker plans to introduce an update to its Control-M program for organizing computing jobs. The revamp, Batch Impact Manager, helps businesses head off glitches and prioritize problem reports, BMC said.

Application failures are very costly to corporations, as they can prevent employees from doing their jobs or take revenue-generating applications, such as e-commerce Web sites, offline.

Business service management products help operators spot more quickly the source of problems that affect application performance, such as problems with servers, networking hardware and other underlying components.

The addition next week of the Batch Impact Manager to the Control-M software will enable system operators to get a consolidated view of scheduled batches of jobs, BMC said. If there is a failure in one of them, the software can send an alert and highlight possible problems with other applications. For example, the failure of a mainframe job to update customer transactions scheduled for the middle of the night could prevent a financial trading application from being available the following morning.

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5342278.html

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Wi-Fi group backs brawnier security standard

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The Wi-Fi Alliance says WPA2 is a big improvement on earlier wireless security standards, such as Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), which hackers have found easy to circumvent. Because WPA2 is compatible with WPA, companies that have already implemented WPA can upgrade to the new standard in stages.

“WPA2 is ideally suited for enterprises in both the public and private sectors,” said Frank Hanzlik, Wi-Fi Alliance managing director. “Products that are certified for WPA2 give IT managers the assurance that the technology meets interoperability standards and in turn helps them manage support and deployment costs.”

Components of WPA2 are included in the 802.11i standard, which was developed by the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and received final approval earlier this summer.

Security, or the lack of it, is thought to have inhibited the implementation of wireless networks by businesses.

Analysts predict that 802.11i could be what is needed to boost the enterprise Wi-Fi market.

As is often the case with new standards, some vendors were keen to steal a march on their rivals. Wireless equipment using prestandard versions of 802.11i has been available for most of this year, but buyers had no guarantee of interoperability.

A Wi-Fi Alliance spokesman said on Wednesday that WPA2 would be “the core from which other security measures emanate” in the future.

Companies obtaining WPA2 certification from the Wi-Fi Alliance on Sept. 1 include Atheros Communications, Broadcom, Cisco Systems, Intel and Realtek.

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105_2-5342824.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=zdnet

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China Legalizes Electronic Signatures To Promote E-Commerce

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The law gives such signatures the legal status of handwritten signatures and allows the creation of companies to verify the identity of participants in an online transaction, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

In China, 87 million people use the Internet. But E-commerce has grown slowly, held back by a low rate of credit-card use and a lack of other online payment options and legal structures.

http://www.internetweek.com/breakingNews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=46200171

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DOJ Accuses Six Of Crippling Rivals’ Web Sites

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According to Attorney General John Ashcroft, six men were indicted this week by a federal grand jury in California on multiple charges for hiring hackers to launch denial-of-service (DoS) attacks against competitors. The case illustrates “the increased use of the Internet to damage rival businesses and communicate threats for commercial advantage,” said Ashcroft in a statement.

The DoS attacks knocked Obit competitor Weaknees.com, a Los Angeles-based online retailer, offline for two weeks. After that, similar DoS attacks were launched against Rapid Satellite of Miami Beach, Fla., and Expert Satellite of Worcester, Mass.

According to affidavits filed by the FBI in the Central District of California federal court, one of the ISP’s hosting a targeted site suffered more than $1 million in losses. That same ISP also hosted the web sites of the Department of Homeland Security and Amazon.com, both of which were temporarily disrupted by the attacks, said the FBI.

http://www.securitypipeline.com/news/45200006;jsessionid=FUTFCA5YF4FUWQSNDBCSKHY

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