Top 10 IT News Stories of the Week
BEA and Oracle, Sun and MySQL, new Microsoft CIO, and more...
IDG News Service —
"1. "BEA Stares Down Oracle, Gets Its Price,"
Network World, January 16
The tug-of-war between Oracle and BEA over how much the former would pay to acquire the latter found BEA with more of the rope on its side this week. Oracle will pay $8.5 billion for BEA, which steadfastly refused Oracle's offer of $6.7 billion three months ago and kept a tight grip despite shareholder pressure when Oracle threatened to drop the bid. Analysts looked at the deal as a win for both sides -- BEA's middleware is popular and its product lines will enhance Oracle's portfolio, while the fact that BEA had such a strong and persistent suitor made it vulnerable to being bought eventually.Customers tend to be spooked by acquisition talks "and nobody wants to buy from you," says Forrester analyst Mike Gilpin.
2. "Update: Sun to Acquire MySQL for $1 Billion,"
InfoWorld, January 16
Sun Microsystems is buying MySQL, the Swedish software vendor whose open-source database is some of the world's most popular Web sites. The deal will help Sun in the lucrative enterprise IT market and allow it to give more support to the LAMP open-source Web application platform. LAMP is an acronym for Linux OS, Apache Web server, MySQL database and PHP/Perl. MySQL's power in the software-as-a-service sector will be a boon, too, according to Sun. The company plans to fork over $800 million cash and $200 million in options to seal the deal, expected to close by the end of Sun's 2008 fiscal year, which closes June 30.
3. "Warning: An IE7 AutoUpdate is Coming Soon,"
PC World, January 17
Microsoft will push out an update of Internet Explorer 7 on Feb. 12, news of which came as more of a warning to some systems administrators who will want to stave off the automatic update. Microsoft posted guidelines for how to do that. Companies still using IE6 need to act to keep IE7 from automatically downloading and installing on users' PCs if they don't want that update, which will be sent via Windows Server update Services, Microsoft said. Administrators who have set WSUS to automatically allow updates will need to disable auto-approval before the roll-out date.
4. "Another New Trojan Intercepts Online Banking Information,"
Computerworld, January 14
A new Trojan program intercepts online banking transactions that are usually protected by two-factor authentication, Symantec warns. Trojan.Silentbanker mimics what a user would normally see in a legitimate transaction, but changes a user's bank account details over to an attacker's account. Users can't tell that their account data has been messed with, so they enter the second authentication password and unwittingly send money to the attacker's account. So far, the Trojan has a low distribution level and is easy to get rid of if it infects a PC, but it's threat lies in its ability to escape detection, Symantec security researcher say. "The scale and sophistication of this emerging banking Trojan is worrying, even for someone who sees banking Trojans on a daily basis," writes Liam O'Murchu on the company's security response blog. Banks in the U.S., France, Spain, Ireland, the U.K., Finland and Turkey are among the more than 400 whose domain names are in a configuration file that the Trojan downloads into victims' PCs. Besides being downloaded, the Trojan can also be passed along through Web exploits.
