BSA targets manufacturers

The Business Software Alliance (BSA) has taken legal action against four UK manufacturing companies, which it claims were guilty of using illegal software, says Computing.co.uk.

The BSA identified a discrepancy between the software installed across the companies' computers and the number of licences held for each product, resulting in charges of software piracy from copyright infringement.

Total costs so far, not including legal fees, have already reached £50 000, according to the BSA. Three of the firms have paid £32 000 in settlement costs, and two have jointly spent £18 000 on the appropriate licences.

Federal authorities have uncovered an elaborate organised crime ring they say recruited 700 immigrants from the former Soviet Union to defraud banks and other creditors of more than $80 million, reports The Register.

According to documents filed in US District Court, in Denver, the organisers hired the immigrants to be pawns in what's known as a "bust out" scheme, in which the identity and credit line of a business are used to get loans by an otherwise non-creditworthy borrower who has no intention of repaying.

Federal authorities in Denver identified 16 so-called "straw buyers", at least two of whom were taken into custody last week.

A cable fault that caused a major blackout of Internet services across West Africa has been repaired, says the BBC.

The damage was discovered 25km off the coast of Benin on a branch of the SAT-3 cable, which connects Europe to SA.

The fault knocked out 70% of Nigeria's bandwidth, causing severe problems for its banking sector, government and mobile phone networks.

Researchers are seeing something unusual in the malware world: a virus that targets a development environment, reports CNet.

The virus, Win32.Induc, was written to infect applications built with Delphi, according to Nick Bilogorskiy, manager of anti-virus researcher at Sonicwall. Delphi is used to write Windows programs, including database applications.

When an infected program is run on a machine running Delphi, the virus infects any software that gets compiled on that machine. The virus spreads the executable file of itself, as well as the source code. It looks for a compiler on the infected system and re-compiles the source code, inserting its code into any programs compiled on the system.