data

Details remain sketchy regarding Monday's announcement of 4.2 million credit card and debit cards exposed at a Maine-based supermarket chain. However, public comments made by Ronald Hodge, CEO of Hannaford Supermarkets, suggest that even with recent improvements in payment card transaction security, there may be holes.

The standards organization, PCI Security Standards International, was founded by American Express, Discover Financial Services, JCB, MasterCard Worldwide, and Visa International. In October 2007, they implemented the PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), which includes, among other things, network specifications. Dr. Neal Krawetz of Hacker Factor Solutions said that PCI DSS allows … Read more

WASHINGTON--As expected, federal regulators on Wednesday voted to overhaul the way they measure how widely broadband is available across the United States.

For years, the Federal Communications Commission has been drawing up reports on the state of U.S. Internet access availability based on methodology that considers 200 kilobits per second (Kbps) service to be "high speed"--and such access to be widely available even in ZIP codes that may, in reality, house only one connection.

The decision to move away from that methodology is potentially significant. Critics, both inside and outside the agency, have charged that the … Read more

It has been a sob story for American politicians, technology companies, and advocacy groups for at least half a decade: the United States, which developed the Internet, is consistently trounced by the likes of Korea and Iceland in how widely it delivers broadband access to its citizens.

But do the latest statistics from the often cited Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which ranked the United States 15th out of 30 countries for broadband penetration rates in 2006, tell the whole story?

Maybe not. Which is one reason, it seems, that the Federal Communications Commission is coming up with … Read more

A Maine-based supermarket chain on Monday reported a data intrusion into its computer network that has put some 4.2 million customer credit and debit card accounts at risk, according to the company and press accounts.

No personal information, such as names or addresses, was accessed, said Ronald Hodge, chief executive of Hannaford Bros. in a letter apologizing to customers. "The stolen data was limited to credit and debit card numbers and expiration dates, and was illegally accessed from our computer systems during transmission of card authorization," he said.

Hodge added that the intrusion affected customers at Hannaford … Read more

Systems management company BMC Software on Monday said it intends to buy BladeLogic for $28 per share, or about $800 million net of cash acquired.

BladeLogic, which went public last year under the ticker BLOG, makes tools for automating jobs in data centers, such as configuring servers and provisioning storage appliances.

BMC said the software will be added to its existing product portfolio and bring it a "significant, high-growth revenue stream."

The acquisition comes at the tail end of a wave of consolidation in the data center software field, which started out earlier this decade.

With the growing … Read more

Harvard says about 10,000 of last year's applicants may have had their personal information compromised. At least 6,600 Social Security numbers were exposed. Worse, a compressed 125 M-byte file containing the stolen student data is currently available via BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer network.

In a statement published Monday night Harvard officials said the database containing summaries of GSAS applicant data for entry to the Fall 2007 academic year, summaries of GSAS housing applicant data for the 2007-08 and 2006-07 academic years, and administrator information had been compromised. The server had been taken offline for several days last month … Read more

Large multinational companies are building data centers designed to flow with their environment. There's something you probably didn't expect to hear five years ago.

Microsoft, for instance, is building a data center in Ireland in which the server rooms and other facilities will be cooled with devices called air side economizers, which pipe outside air inside.

"It uses fresh air aggressively to keep your building cool," said Rob Bernard, Microsoft's chief environmental strategist, in a phone interview. "The ideal scenario is that if Ireland continues to develop wind power and hopefully wave power, you … Read more

Back in December, Microsoft dutifully notified the (few) people using its Windows Home Server software that a bug in the product could corrupt files.

Typically, when Microsoft posts a bulletin outlining specific problems in its products, as it did in this case, a fix is usually right around the corner.

Not so for Windows Home Server. According to a bulletin posted this week, the bug will not be fixed until June, when the company posts a patch. That means, in essence, Windows Home Server will be on the market for a year before the fix comes.

When certain programs such … Read more

About six months ago, German police reported disrupting a terrorist plot against U.S. installations in their country, thanks in part to intelligence tips from American agents. Now officials in the two nations have hatched a formal plan to share more information about known and suspected terrorists.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, and their German counterparts--Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble and Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries--initialed an agreement on Tuesday to swap fingerprint and DNA data.

At a Tuesday press conference at German government headquarters in Berlin, Mukasey hailed the proposed cooperation as a &… Read more