Latest IT News:

London hospitals to face hefty bill for IT plan work:

by Tony Collins
Tuesday 27 January 2004

Leaked memo confirms doctors' fears that trusts must provide resources.

Health Service organisations in London have been warned that a failure to carry out a wide range of implementation measures for the �2.3bn national programme for IT may place the NHS in default of its �996m contract with local service provider BT.

Such a default could compromise future legal efforts by the NHS to lay unequivocal blame on the supplier for any contractual failures.

The warning was contained in a briefing paper which was distributed to NHS executives within the past two weeks. It summarised the contract with the BT-led Capital Care Alliance (CCA), which won a 10-year deal in December to run NHSIT systems for London's population of 7.2 million people.

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FTSE firms address IT security in new forum:

By Cliff Saran
Tuesday 27 January 2004

The heads of IT security at organisations with a combined IT budget of more than �10bn have formed a forum to drive forward a new approach to security.

Ten organisations, including the BBC, BP, ICI, Royal Mail and the government, were represented at the inaugural meeting of the Jericho Forum earlier this month.

The group was formed to bring together the latest thinking on user-driven approaches to security, also known as radical externalisation, boundaryless network security and deperimeterisation.

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AMD develops hardware fix to target major XP security risk :

by James Rogers
Tuesday 27 January 2004

AMD is developing technology in the next generation of x86-compatible microprocessors to combat one of the largest security loopholes in Windows-based computing.

The chipmaker is working with Microsoft to build safeguards into its 32-bit-compatible Athlon 64 processors to protect against buffer overflow virus attacks on Windows-based PCs. Buffer overflow errors have been behind global attacks such as last year's MSBlaster and Code Red.

A buffer overflow attack overwhelms the computer's buffer memory space with data before inserting malicious code, which is then executed by the processor. The technology to guard against this, called "no execute" (NX), relies on a combination of the processor and the operating system detecting misuse of computer memory.

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