LONDON -- The overall cost of security breaches at large U.K. companies rose by about 50 percent between 2004 and 2005, according to a study that was commissioned by the U.K. government and released last week at the Infosecurity Europe 2006 conference here.

However, the biannual survey of 1,000 companies of varying sizes also found that the number of breaches reported by large businesses in the U.K. dropped by about half from year to year because of increased security budgets.

Overall, the percentage of companies that reported having security incidents dropped from 74 percent to 64 percent. "That's good news," said Alun Michael, the U.K.'s minister of state for industry and regional economies. "But it's no cause for complacency."

Briefly noted

Intel Corp. has opened a research and development center for multicore processors at its lab in Braunschweig, Germany. The chip maker had said last year that it would shift the Braunschweig facility's focus from designing chips for optical networks to developing "many-core" processors and related software.