New Trojan attacks phones

Users of Symbian Series 60 smart phones should be aware of a new Trojan horse that, if not removed within one hour, could cause complete data loss in their wireless devices, security experts warn.

Several owners of Symbian-based handsets caught the Trojan Doomboot.A after downloading unauthorised mobile phone games containing the malware, says Anton Von Troyer, marketing manager of Finnish anti-virus vendor F-Secure.

What makes Doomboot.A a serious threat to phones, according to Von Troyer, is the Commwarrior.B worm it contains, PCWorld reports.

"The worm sends a continuous stream of MMS messages, which will drain the battery of most phones in about an hour," he says. "When users try to reboot, they can`t. Their handsets need to be reformatted, resulting in complete loss of their data, such as photos, calendar and address book."

Chipmaker Broadcom has filed an anti-trust lawsuit against larger rival Qualcomm, saying Qualcomm is unfairly using its licence business to help sell its chips, News.com reports.

The lawsuit in the US District Court in New Jersey seeks monetary damages and a permanent injunction barring Qualcomm`s "unfair business practices", according to a Broadcom statement.

"They`re using the licensing terms to their advantage in the sale of chipsets," says George Cary of law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, representing Broadcom.

Qualcomm "has tried to cover up this by insisting on nondisclosure terms to anybody who asks for a licence", Cary added. He said it was too early to estimate the amount Broadcom is seeking in damages because the market for W-CMDA phones is still in the early stages.

"We`re looking into the complaint and believe it`s without merit," says Qualcomm spokesperson Emily Kilpatrick.

Microsoft will release the next version of SQL Server on 7 November as part of a worldwide launch of three of its flagship software packages.

Key features of the forthcoming database software will be a reduction in software downtime due to maintenance or hardware failure, and enhanced application security, according to the software giant.

One of the key SQL 2005 advances is a database mirroring function that allows changes to be made to operating databases without the need for downtime, Vnunet.com reports.

"The new code is designed to make life easier for developers and administrators," said Andrew Lees, corporate VP of server tools at Microsoft, in his keynote address at Microsoft TechEd 2005 Europe in Amsterdam.

Sun is falling behind in the storage market, according to Gartner`s latest market report. In an external controller-based market that has grown 11% in the past 12 months, Sun`s share has dived by 17.4%.

The report states that worldwide external controller-based disk storage is now worth $3.54 billion. In this market, EMC is the leader with 23%, equating to $814.7 million, fractionally down over the year.

HP comes second with 6.2% growth. IBM is number three with a near 12% share. It grew faster than the market as customers bought its new DS8000 and DS6000 products, Techworld reports.

Dell comes fifth but is the fastest-growing vendor with a 35.8% rise in revenue. Gartner says this vindicates its decision to enter the storage market with the EMC AX100. It has overtaken Sun in market share terms. So too has number six vendor NetApp, which grew its revenue 27.2%.