Website reveals Windows 2000 and XP SP1 DoS vulnerability

A potential vulnerability in Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 and Windows XP Service Pack 1 has been publicly revealed by the French Security Incident Response Team. The organisation has drawn the ire of Microsoft by publishing details of a proof-of-concept exploit that targets the vulnerability. According to the author, a specially crafted request to upnp_getdevicelist can cause services. ...more

BT charges users over its mistakes

British Telecom is to bill thousands of Internet users after discovering that it had been inadvertently providing them with truly free Internet access. Some of BT's telephone exchanges had failed to recognise the 0845 numbers used by subscribers to connect, and instead registered them as dialling a free 0800 number. Despite admitting that the whole affair has been due to its own mistakes, the telecom company still "needs to recoup the money", which is estimated to amount to around ?5 million. ...more

Nasdaq stock exchange threatens to delist SCO

Controversial Unix company SCO is in the dog house with the Nasdaq stock exchange, which is threatening to delist the company if it doesn't straighten out its finances. The troubles centre on accounting procedures for its employee stock purchase plan that delayed the filing of its 10K annual report - due at the end of January. SCO's PR Director Blake Stowell said that this involved 'an accounting treatment we have to consider before filing our 10K . ...more

Digital chart detects download rigging

A British band has been caught up in what is believed to be the first case of digital chart rigging. Industry, the latest signal by The Modern, would have entered the UK Official Top 40 chart at number 13 had routine checks for 'unusual sales patterns' not revealed that the track had been downloaded in large batches from HMV. One buyer bought the song more than 100 times. ...more

No hackers for Microsoft

Microsoft has issued a statement regarding the recent outage of its Web sites and blamed a misconfigured DNS server rather than the work of hackers. In a statement issued late yesterday, the company admitted that a Microsoft engineer made a configuration change to routers at the edge of the DNS network. Unfortunately, the mistaken configuration change meant that many of the Microsoft sites were unreachable. ...more