Israeli police uncover Trojan horse spy ring

-- Israeli police have uncovered a major industrial spy ring that allegedly used Trojan horse software to snoop into some of the country"s leading companies.

A husband-and-wife team, Michael Haephrati and Ruth Brier-Haephrati, was detained last week in London on suspicion of creating the Trojan horse program. The software was sent via e-mail or computer disks to people at targeted companies and was then used by competitors to harvest confidential information from the infected PCs, according to a report in the Haaretz newspaper.

The Tel Aviv-based newspaper detailed how a wide range of businesses, including television, mobile phone, automotive and utility companies, allegedly used the Trojan horse to obtain "tens of thousands" of pilfered documents.

Police told Haaretz that the companies started using the malicious software after engaging the services of any one of three private investigation agencies, which were given the task of carrying out the industrial espionage. The newspaper reported that another 21 people have been detained for questioning in Israel.

UK biometric test finds scanning glitches

LONDON -- The U.K. government has reintroduced a bill to create a biometric identity card system by 2010 to help fight terrorism and fraud, after having shelved the measure before last month"s general election [QuickLink 53211]. But it also released a report describing what officials called "teething problems" with the technology.

The report on the U.K. Passport Service"s eight-month trial of biometric technology, which involved 10,000 people, cited problems with scanning large fingers and the eyes of people with dark complexions, for example.

Of the three methods tested, facial scanning had the lowest verification success rate, especially in bad lighting, the study found. Fingerprint scanning had a better success rate, but the report said the scanner surface was "too small to scan a sufficient area of fingerprint from participants with large fingers." Eye scanning was the most accurate, but the machines had difficulty scanning the irises of people with dark complexions and people over the age of 59, according to the report.

Japan aims for PFLOPS in supercomputer race

TOKYO -- Japan this month will begin a research effort to build a supercomputer capable of crunching numbers about 30 times faster than today"s fastest system can, the country"s government said last week.

Japan"s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology has established a program with NEC Corp., Hitachi Ltd. and several Japanese universities to develop by 2011 a supercomputer that can perform more than 3 quadrillion floating-point operations per second, or 3 PFLOPS. "We predict that [IBM"s] Blue Gene/L or its successors will be working at about 3 or 4 PFLOPS around 2010. Our target is to be at least the same speed or faster," a ministry official said.

Briefly noted

-- Transmeta Corp. in Santa Clara, Calif., said last week that it has agreed to sell its Crusoe line of microprocessors to Culturecom Technology Ltd. in Hong Kong for US$15 million in cash. Transmeta announced in late March that it would exit the chip-making business after failing to break into the market for notebook PCs [QuickLink 53539].

-- Deutsche Telekom AG, Europe"s largest telecommunications service provider, last month named 46-year-old Peter Thomas Sany CIO, effective Sept. 1, and said he will be in charge of information management and processes. The Bonn-based company also named its first chief technology officer, Anton Hendrik Schaaf, 51, who will be responsible for technology and innovation activities starting June 16.

-- Degussa AG, a large specialty chemicals company in D¸sseldorf, Germany, has selected AT&T Corp. as its worldwide data network provider under a five-year contract valued at $45 million, AT&T announced last month.

GLOBAL FACT

10 years

Maximum jail sentence for phishing proposed in a U.K. antifraud bill.

Source: IDG News Service