Alcatel-Lucent is hoping to cash in on the recent spate of corporate data losses with a new 3G card that can remotely cripple a stolen PC.
The company’s Nonstop Laptop Guardian (NLG) is a PC card device that boasts its own processor, memory and Linux operating system. The device is kept always-on with its own internal battery and 3G data connection, that can be used to disable or even wipe the PC if it’s reported lost or stolen.
The company is also working with security vendor McAfee to encrypt the data on laptops fitted with the NLG. Any data stored on the PC becomes useless if the card, which holds the encryption keys, is removed.
Alcatel-Lucent claims the device will ease the burden of responsibility for data loss from employees’ shoulders.
“Because it’s got the always-on capability, IT help desks and management centres can remotely access the PC, remotely track the PC, remotely patch manage the PC, remotely kill the PC, remotely encrypt the PC,” Peter Tebbutt, business development director at Alcatel-Lucent told PC Pro. “You’re not dependent on the laptop being on. The card has its own life.”
Tebbutt claims the device has a standby battery life of 100 hours, although it can also draw power and recharge itself from the main laptop battery. “You can set the parameters on the card to say ‘if the laptop battery is low, don’t draw from it’,” he said to address fears of a negative impact on laptop battery life.
The NLG essentially replaces the laptop’s existing 3G data card, with Tebbutt claiming it will work with “pretty much any SIM card out there”.
Companies can either control the NLG devices internally with a dedicated management server or opt to have them managed by a service provider.
The device has been on sale in the US since last year, but the recent deluge of data losses has undoubtedly encouraged the company to target the UK.
The NLG will cost around £145, with a monthly charge of around £5-£10.
A computer virus is alive and well on the International Space Station (ISS).
Nasa has confirmed that laptops carried to the ISS in July were infected with a virus known as Gammima.AG.
The worm was first detected on earth in August 2007 and lurks on infected machines waiting to steal login names for popular online games.
Nasa said it was not the first time computer viruses had travelled into space and it was investigating how the machines were infected.
Orbital outbreak
Space news website SpaceRef broke the story about the virus on the laptops that astronauts took to the ISS.
Nasa told SpaceRef that no command or control systems of the ISS were at risk from the malicious program.
The laptops infected with the virus were used to run nutritional programs and let the astronauts periodically send e-mail back to Earth.
The laptops carried by astronauts reportedly do not have any anti-virus software on them to prevent infection.
Once it has scooped up passwords and login names the Gammima.AG worm virus tries to send them back to a central server. It targets a total of 10 games most of which are popular in the Far East such as Maple Story, HuangYi Online and Talesweaver.
Nasa is working with partners on the ISS to find out how the virus got on to the laptop in the first place.
The ISS has no direct net connection and all data traffic travelling from the ground to the spacecraft is scanned before being transmitted.
It is thought that the virus might have travelled via a flash or USB drive owned by an astronaut and taken into space.
The space agency also plans to put in place security systems to stop such incidents happening in the future.
Nasa told Wired News that viruses had infected laptops taken to the ISS on several occasions but the outbreaks always only been a “nuisance”.
ESET Secures Record-Breaking 50th Virus Bulletin Award for Security Excellence
Detects 100 Percent of Viruses, Worms and Bots with Zero False Positives
San Diego, June 4, 2008 – ESET®, the leader in proactive threat protection, today announced it has captured a record 50th VB100 award from Virus Bulletin, a widely-respected independent comparative testing group. ESET is the first company to reach the 50-award milestone.
Virus Bulletin introduced its first VB100 award in 1998, and conducts several comparatives every year, rotating its platforms between Linux, Windows, Windows servers and Novell Netware. In order to display the VB100 logo, an antivirus product must meet two criteria: (1) Demonstrate it detects all “In-the-Wild” viruses during both on-demand and on-access scanning; and, (2) Generate no false positives when scanning a set of clean files. Since the inception of VB100 awards in 1998, ESET’s antivirus products boast a success rate of over 96 percent — the industry’s highest. Most antivirus vendors have success ratios in the 50 – 75 percent range.
“With excellent detection and no false positive issues, ESET has stormed its way to a record 50th VB100 award,” said John Hawes of Virus Bulletin. “The ESET installation process proved fast and efficient, and the command line scanner was a joy to operate.”
“No other company can claim 50 VB100 awards, and we are very pleased to be the first,” said Anton Zajac, CEO of ESET, LLC. “I want to personally thank our employees, and notably the research and development teams that continue to produce security software’s most proactive, precise, lightweight and fast product.”
ESET File Security for Linux — the subject of this month’s testing — is powered by ThreatSense® technology, an advanced heuristics engine that enables proactive detection of malware not covered by even the most frequently updated signature-based products. Unlike traditional approaches, ESET solutions decode and analyze executable code in real-time, using an emulated environment. By allowing malware to execute in a secure virtual world, ESET is able to clearly differentiate between benign files and even the most sophisticated and cleverly-disguised malware.
The UK government has launched a competition to find innovative ways of using the masses of data it collects.
It is hoping to find new uses for public information in the areas of criminal justice, health and education.
The Power of Information Taskforce – headed by cabinet office minister Tom Watson – is offering a £20,000 prize fund for the best ideas.
To help with the task, the government is opening up gigabytes of information from a variety of sources.
This includes mapping information from the Ordnance Survey, medical information from the NHS , neighbourhood statistics from the Office for National Statistics and a carbon calculator from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).
None of the data will be personal information, the government is keen to stress.
Mr Watson is hoping to attract a wide range of people from “the technology community we already work with, to hard-core coders to adolescents in their bedroom”.
He admits that throwing open public data could be a risk but he believes that it will yield results.
“If someone comes up with a great idea we will make a prototype and then hopefully a fully-fledged piece of technology that will make peoples’ lives better,” he said.
“I strongly believe in co-design and in the digital age it makes sense to work with citizens to make public service better,” he added.
To help inspire ideas the team behind the idea has put dozens of examples of innovative ways of reusing public information on its Taskforce wiki.
These include a website which maps crimes around the UK, the FixMyStreet website, which allows users to alert other to litter, vandalism and graffiti in their local environment, and the prototype RateMyPrison, which invites those who visit friend and families in jail to comment on the experience.
Technology commentator Bill Thompson was one of the first to see the Show Us a Better Way website, which details the competition.
“It’s great to see a government department with enough sense to realise that it doesn’t have all the good ideas,” he said.
“There are terabytes of expensively accumulated information sitting in databases, but it goes unused and unexploited because of restrictive licenses and lack of awareness,” he added.
The government will evaluate the ideas over the course of the summer.
Source – BBC
A complaint lodged by BT about the speeds of Virgin Media’s broadband service has been upheld by the Advertising Standards Authority.
The challenge centred on its advertisement Hate to Wait?, which ran in the national media and featured download times for songs and TV shows.
BT argued that Virgin’s usage caps meant that downloads during peak times would be slower than advertised.
The ASA has agreed and ordered Virgin to make it clear that speeds will vary.
Confusing megabits
In its adjudication it said that the advert did not make it clear that customers on Virgin Media’s lower speed packages would be able to download TV shows at the speeds advertised only during off-peak hours.
It ruled that Virgin Media needed to clarify that download times would be restricted during peak hours.
Virgin Media argued that, for users of its M 2Mbps (megabits per second) package, a TV show downloaded during peak hours would take only a few minutes longer to download.
But it did admit that users would be subject to its so-called traffic management system, which caps data usage during peak hours.
It said that the issue would affect only users of the 2Mbps service.
Customers on its L 4Mbps package could download 60 songs and/or two TV shows before reaching caps while those on the XL 20Mbps package could download 614 songs or nine TV shows before their speeds would be subject to caps, Virgin said.
“We believe our Hate to Wait? campaign provided a simple and transparent comparison between broadband speeds for consumers looking to choose between Virgin Media’s M, L and XL broadband packages,” Virgin Media said in a statement.
On a secondary issue, Virgin admitted that it wrongly used the term “megabits” when referring to the size of the files being downloaded and agreed to change it to the correct “megabytes” term.
It also agreed to amend the ad to reflect the fact that it would take some customers longer to download a TV show than stated.
The issue of so-called traffic throttling, where internet service providers place limits on the amount of data users can download, has become more pertinent with the growth of video-sharing sites and TV catch-up services such as the iPlayer.
In the US some providers are banning access to file-sharing sites such as BitTorrent and in the UK the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) is in talks with providers, including Virgin Media, about banning heavy users of file-sharing sites.
“ISPs are responding to the growth of online video services and capping is also a way of migrating customers onto faster and more expensive tariffs,” said James Garlick, analyst with Screen Digest.
Virgin Media believes traffic-throttling is vital to ensure a good service.
“Our traffic management policy helps ensure the majority of customers receive the quality of service they expect from our fibre-optic broadband product by managing demand from the heaviest users at certain times of the day,” said a spokesman for Virgin Media.
The broadband arena in the UK has become hugely competitive and the ASA has received a steady stream of complaints, sometimes from consumers but often from rival providers, about the speeds of both fixed and mobile broadband.
“There are lots of factors which affect speed. Consumers are concerned about it but often it is competitors keeping an eye on each other,” said a spokesman from the ASA.
Source – BBC
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