Short takes on this week's news
Digital mafia recruits youngsters to hack
firms
Organised criminals in the UK, Holland, France and Italy are
recruiting young people to hack into corporate systems. They employ
lone hackers and low-level virus writers to create code for
phishing, credit card and extortion scams, according to a report
from security firm McAfee. The number of malicious threats has
increased from 300 a month to 1,500 a month over the past two
years. About 70% of malicious code is written purely for profit,
the report said.
WHSmith buys app to predict finance and
staff
Retailer WHSmith is to use ALG Software's Predictive Planning
application to enable its finance and operational teams to forecast
resource requirements for each of its 553 high street stores. The
web-based tool will allow the company to match staffing
requirements with trading patterns, providing more accurate
staffing budgets.
IT directors happy to pay less and drop
standards
Some IT directors are prepared to accept a reduced quality of
service if it means getting a lower price, according to a leading
IT infrastructure supplier. Speaking at a conference for heads of
IT suppliers, Computacenter chief executive Mike Norris said, "CIOs
want to increase their revenues and margins or reduce costs. It is
easier to sell cost reductions at present. Service can be 'good
enough'. You do not have to increase service. CIOs will even take
marginal deterioration of service to get a better price."
Liberty Alliance updates web services framework
Standards advocate the Liberty Alliance has released ID-WSF 2.0,
the second version of its web services framework specifications.
The publicly available framework has been extended to include
support for SAML 2.0, which converges the identity federation
specifications from Liberty Alliance, Oasis and I2/Shibboleth.
Mercedes signs deal for global software
roll-out
DaimlerChrysler has signed a "multimillion-euro" contract with
Dassault Systèmes company Delmia to implement new manufacturing
software for its Mercedes car plants across the world. The car
giant recently re-organised its IT management to bring technology
changes closer to the needs of the business.