Phone makers RIM and Nokia denied installing on their mobile devices an app which can monitor what users are doing without their knowledge or consent while carriers AT&T and Sprint admitted to using it. The companies responded after a security researcher demonstrated in online videos how the “Carrier IQ” software worked on Google’s Android operating system and said that phones running RIM’s BlackBerry platform and Nokia’s Symbian OS also had the software installed. AT&T and Sprint said they use “Carrier IQ” to monitor network quality.

Blackstone Group and Bain Capital are preparing a bid for all of Yahoo with Asian partners in a deal that could value the Internet company at about $25 billion, a source familiar with the matter said. The potential bid by the consortium, which would include China’s Alibaba and Japan’s Softbank, has not yet been finalized, the source and two other people familiar with the matter said. E-commerce giant Alibaba, whose primary interest is in buying back a 40 percent stake owned by Yahoo, is keeping its options open and said it has not decided whether to participate in a bid for all of Yahoo.

Apple’s iPhone edged past major news events, celebrities and pop stars as the top searched term on the Web in 2011, according to Yahoo. The media company said the smartphone proved more popular than reality television celebrity Kim Kardashian, pop star Katy Perry and singer and actress Jennifer Lopez, who placed in the top five. Casey Anthony, the woman acquitted of the murder of her young daughter after a highly publicized trial, was No. 2.

Best Buy is recalling about 32,000 Rocketfish battery cases for iPhones because of a fire hazard, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and Health Canada said. The Richfield, Minnesota, company and the CPSC have received about 14 reports of the Rocketfish Model RF-KL12 Mobile Battery Case overheating while charging in the United States, the CPSC said.

The European Commission joined forces with major technology firms including Apple, Facebook and Google to improve the protection of children online. The coalition, which includes 28 companies, will develop an age-based online ratings system and aims to strengthen privacy settings. It also plans by the end of next year to make it easier to report inappropriate content. Other measures include improving parental controls and enhancing cooperation among law enforcement and hotline authorities to remove online material showing sexual abuse.

Source:http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2011/12/01/tech-wrap-att-sprint-admit-using-monitoring-software/

Charles Schwab Corp. (SCHW) said it agreed to acquire Compliance11 Inc., a provider of regulatory compliance software, as the discount brokerage boosts its trade monitoring services for clients.

Schwab didn’t disclose financial terms of the transaction, but said the deal to acquire the Chicago firm would close in the fourth quarter of 2011, subject to customary closing conditions.

The San Francisco company expects to combine Compliance11’s technology with its own services, offered under Schwab’s Designated Brokerage Services business, or DBS.

Schwab, the largest discount brokerage in terms of client assets, provides trade monitoring technology to 650 corporate relationships, including financial services firms and investment advisers, who monitor over $30 billion in assets across 130,000 employee accounts.

The deal underscores the financial services industry’s increasing efforts to beef up compliance practices amid enhanced scrutiny from regulators.

Incidents, including the recent rogue-trading scandal at UBS AG (UBS, UBSN.VX), have shined a light on the monitoring policies of banks, where excessive risk-taking could mean heavy losses. In September, UBS said a London-based trader at the firm’s investment bank had lost $2.3 billion through unauthorized trades.

“A heightened regulatory focus and attention to corporate reputational risk create more reason than ever for firms to seek out efficient solutions to help meet their compliance obligations,” said Jim McCool, executive vice president and head of Institutional Services at Schwab, in a statement.

Source:http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20111028-716667.html

Process Query Systems (ProQueSys) has shipped the first of what the company says will be a quarterly series of updates to its FlowTraq network flow monitoring product. New features in this version include support for virtual local area networks (VLAN) and autonomous systems (AS); improved filtering; and enhancements to the user interface, as well as improvements in speed.

The software, which was introduced as a standalone product for the first time last fall, offers three functions: monitoring the network to look for problems, performing forensics to determine whether the problem has occurred previously and anticipating threats by using baseline information to look out for problems in the future. Network flow data is generated by infrastructure devices such as switches and routers.

Chris St. Myers, a senior security engineer for Rackspace Hosting Inc., a San Antonio-based hosting and cloud computing company, has been beta-testing the new version and says he was primarily interested in the product’s speed improvements. To be able to search through 96 gigabytes an hour and eight months of traffic, “is really neat,” he says.

While his company’s network group has other tools to look for intruders, he can use the software to find more subtle attacks that might not show up as a big enough event on the other group’s software. “If we’re seeing something weird, traffic coming from a website it normally doesn’t, we can pick that out.”

Support for tracking AS is something that many of ProQueSys’ Internet Service Provider (ISP) users have been requesting, says Vincent Berk, chief executive officer of the Lebanon, N.H., company. The software now offers ISPs the ability to track the exact volumes of traffic through AS, and also track where abuse might be coming from. This is important in today’s Internet because it gives the ISPs the ability to shut off the abusers or throttle them, he says. The increased ability to filter means that network administrators can now look at data after the fact, such as checking to see whether an employee leaving an organization has transferred files to their home computers or their new employers, he says.

VLAN and AS support brings the product up to par with other products in the market, and the enhancements to the user interface and new filtering techniques will improve operator efficiency, said Jim Frey, research director for Enterprise Management Associates Inc., a Portsmouth, N.H., consultancy.

Beyond that, the update is most relevant as proof that the company is committed to regular, continuous improvement through an aggressive quarterly release schedule, he says. The core strength of FlowTraq continues to be the blazing speed with which flow data can be navigated and analyzed, coupled with the fact that it retains all flow records for far longer than others in the marketplace, which is huge for forensic accuracy when studying either network performance or security issues, Frey says.

FlowTraq pricing starts at $9,600 for a small installation and ranges from $20,000 to $40,000 for large, distributed installations. The new version is available now.

Source:http://www.networkcomputing.com/wan-security/proquesys-ships-network-and-security-monitoring-software.php