Pandemic Risk Spurs Flu Summit; Business Frets over Wireless Security; New Bagle Variants Emerge; California Lawmakers Want More Disclosure on Privacy Breaches

Pandemic Risk Spurs Flu Summit

The World Health Organization, concerned about a potential flu pandemic, has called an unprecedented meeting of flu vaccine makers and nations to deal with the emerging threat. According to a report in the Washington Post, 16 vaccine companies and health officials from the United States and other countries will attend the meeting in Geneva on Nov. 11. The major concern is that the bird flu, which is becoming established in Asia, and other cases that cannot be linked to contaminated poultry, suggest that the virus might be adapting itself to spread more easily from person to person.

For more details, read the full article in The Washington Post.

Business Frets over Wireless Security

Nearly four in 10 IT directors say wireless security is their biggest challenge. According to a report in The Register, the survey taken by IT consultant C&C Technology, also found that in 39 percent of companies no more than one quarter of the workforce was using mobile products. Said Jason Colombo, technical director at C&C Technology, “Wireless and mobile working together can deliver enormous benefits, however there are still a lot of security concerns regarding these networks.”

For more details, read the full report in The Register.

New Bagle Variants Emerge

Three new versions of the Bagle worm made rounds on the Internet late last week. According to a report by IDG News Service (a sister company to CXO Media), antivirus firms are calling the new threats “medium” risk. The first Bagle worm appeared January 19 and since then more than 40 versions of the worm have sprouted up, according to the report. The worms target systems running Microsoft Windows and harvest e-mail addresses from infected machines to send virus-infected e-mails to the addresses it captures.

For more details, read the full IDG News Service story in Computerworld.

California Lawmakers Want More Disclosure on Privacy Breaches

Four members of the California state assembly have been critical of the state’s Department of Social Services’ handling of a potential privacy breach involving 1.4 million Californians. According to a Computerworld (a sister company of CXO Media) report, after the state learned of an apparent security breach that may have compromised the personal data of recipients and providers of the DSS’s In-Home Suportive Services Program, officials at the DSS releaded a media advisory on the incident. In a letter last week to the secretary of California’s Health and Human Services agency (which oversees the DSS), the lawmakers said that the media advisory was not the most effective way to distribute this information and that efforts should be made to individually inform each affected party.

For more details, read the full report in Computerworld/b>.