"In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."

—Benjamin Franklin

2nd March 2011 – Imperva’s Application Defense Center (ADC) have discovered a new type of online tax scheme. Online schemes to steal money using tax rebates as a lure have been around for some time, and well documented.  However, past attempts have often been manual, tedious efforts.  Today’s initiatives feature much more sophisticated, automated tactics.  We believe the past success of “getting a bigger refund, earlier” has helped inspire a new set of tools and approaches to defraud consumers.

A leading IT security expert claims that, despite all the media hype, virtualisation is actually not a new technology, and dates all the way back to the 1960s. Professor John Walker, member of the Security Advisory Group of ISACA’s London Chapter and CTO of Secure-Bastion, said that, although it’s not a new technology, it has recently come to the forefront again and offers organizations many benefits to the enterprise IT environment.   Professor Walker, gave an online presentation in which he said that whilst virtualisation's benefits include reduced server sprawl and a quicker build time, there are clear security issues.   As with any system, or application configuration, he said, control is vital to security, and its professionals should remember that this security principal applies to the on-line and off-line images alike.  

LONDON, UK – March 2, 2011 – Hitachi Consulting has been named as an Entrepreneur in the Green Quadrant® Sustainable Technology Services report by Verdantix. This report defines sustainable technology services as IT consulting, systems design, software implementation and IT systems integration that support sustainable business objectives such as energy efficiency, emissions management, renewable energy infrastructure and sustainability risk assessment.

According to Verdantix, Hitachi Consulting is one of the few firms evaluated that has capabilities across all of the areas evaluated with an impressive level of innovation and customer success achieved on climate change risk assessment. Hitachi Consulting also scored strong for capabilities in data centre efficiency. The results of this study were based on Hitachi Consulting’s international capabilities in the United States, Europe and Japan.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., March 1st, 2011 – Applied Materials, Inc. and Magma Design Automation, Inc. announced today that they have integrated Magma’s CAD (computer-aided design)-based navigation and yield analysis software with Applied’s advanced inspection systems. This unique combination of design and manufacturing tools has accelerated lithography qualification and improved chip yields at multiple customers for the development and production of advanced technology nodes.

“The introduction of CAD-based inspection technology for defect analysis and monitoring at GLOBALFOUNDRIES Fab 1 has helped improve defect management efficiency and reduce cycle time for process optimization,” said Remo Kirsch, manager of Contamination Free Manufacturing at GLOBALFOUNDRIES Fab 1 in Dresden, Germany. “Both our production and development lines now rely on this technology to help guarantee process quality and yield stability.”