Dan Verton

Several banks in the Washington D.C. area have been forced to cancel and reissue thousands of Visa debit cards after a hacker allegedly intercepted a file containing purchase data from a local online merchant.

Systems that remain infected with the Code Red worm are scheduled to launch another round of distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDOS) against the White House Web server Sunday, but the FBI said the threat posed to the Internet by the upcoming attack "is significantly reduced."

A cloud of fear and uncertainty hung over the 10th annual Usenix Security Symposium in Washington D.C. last week, as IT researchers wondered nervously whether they would be hauled off to jail by the FBI for revealing security flaws in an anti-piracy technology backed by the music industry.

Intelligence data began pouring in on a Thursday afternoon. The press hadn't picked up on it yet, but there was a problem brewing on the Internet. A computer worm had been uncovered that, if left unchecked, could begin to bog down Web sites and e-commerce around the country.

IT professionals and trainers in the United States are blaming insufficient security training offered under the nationwide Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer program for contributing to the spread of Code Red and other damaging viruses.

The CIA's private-sector IT research and development firm, In-Q-Tel Inc., faces significant hurdles in breaking through the agency's secretive culture, but by most industry standards the two-year old start-up has "a good track record" and is "worth the risk," according to a report released Wednesday by an independent panel of experts.

Oracle Corp. has unveiled a new version of its flagship database software that company executives claim will give Oracle a technical edge over its rivals and make it the only vendor with a major product upgrade at one of the most contentious times the database market has seen in years.

A survey of U.S. companies released today by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and an association of IT security workers found that 85 per cent of the respondents detected computer security breaches in the past 12 months and 64 per cent suffered financial losses as a result of the incursions.