TB case highlights e-mail archiving trend
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(InfoWorld) - E-mail archiving and recovery software has proved itself useful in the case of the American who flew to Europe even though he had tuberculosis (TB). The Fulton County, Georgia, Department of Health and Wellness tried to prevent Andrew Speaker, of Atlanta, from traveling to Europe for his wedding and honeymoon in May because his drug-resistant form of TB could make him contagious to other airline passengers. Speaker has said in media interviews that he had not been told he couldn't fly. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper covering the case filed an open records request with Fulton County Georgia Government to disclose e-mail messages among health officials in which Speaker's case was discussed. The Fulton County case illustrates how e-mail archiving software can facilitate e-discovery, the process by which organizations retrieve internal electronic documents sought in a government investigation, a lawsuit, or other matters. The market for "active e-mail archiving" software grew to $207 million in 2006, based on licensing revenue, a 42.8 percent increase from 2005, according to the research firm Gartner, which forecasts a $1 billion market by 2011. The top two vendors are Symantec, with $110 million in revenue and a 23 percent share, and Zantaz, with $106 million and a 22 percent share, according to IDC. Autonomy, a British software company, announced July 3Â plans to acquire ZantazÂ for $375 million. Fulton County uses Symantec's Enterprise Vault software. "All I basically had to do was say. ... I want any e-mails retrieved for me that involved the name Andrew Speaker," said Rich Diller e-mail administrator for Fulton County. The software retrieved about 200 pages of e-mail correspondence related to Speaker's case. Based on those documents, the Journal-Constitution was able to report in a June 13 story that although health department officials were scrambling to find a legal way to prevent Speaker from getting on a plane, he had already left. The county retrieved the requested e-mail messages in about 90 minutes. Had the software not been available, the search would have been "your proverbial nightmare," said Diller. "It would have been me opening up individual mailboxes and constructing one-off searches on each mailbox and compiling all the data." Fulton County Government has 7,000 e-mail boxes, said Robert Taylor, chief information officer for the county. "We could not do an enterprise search [manually]. It would have taken us weeks or months," Taylor said, adding that the county gets four to five document search requests each week. Drivers for the growth of e-discovery technology are many: Most all business communications today are done electronically; new U.S. Federal Rules for Civil Procedure (FRCPs) require companies to establish a policy on how electronic documents are preserved and organized; and some enterprises have been embarrassed by sloppy lapses in saving electronic files sought in various cases. But awareness of e-mail archiving appears limited. An independent survey commissioned by another vendor, C2C Systems, revealed that only 24 percent of IT professionals surveyed could identify an e-mail archiving product by name and 37 percent felt that using PSTs was sufficient for e-mail archiving. The file name extension .PST is for personal files, including e-mail. But that is not an adequate archiving tool, said Nick Mehta, vice president of product management at Symantec. PSTs (the actual term is personal information store) are hard to search if they are scattered among multiple desktops. Symantec's Enterprise Vault copies all e-mail, voice mail and instant messages into secured storage and classifies them based on rules the enterprise sets for what needs to be saved, Mehta said. The software also deduplicates the data, eliminating multiple copies of the same messages, to more efficiently use storage capacity. Messages can be saved for 90 days, seven years or forever depending on the company's rules. The database is keyword searchable to retrieve files as needed. Smaller players in the market can also do well. "This market is. ... on fire," said Mike Ivanov, senior director of the archiving business at CommVault Systems, whose sales doubled to $10 million in 2006, from 2005. Speaker remains in treatment at a TB hospital in Denver, in which he is quarantined by order of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. News reports last week revealed that his TB was not as contagious as originally diagnosed.
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By BRIAN BERGSTEIN BOSTON - A new study that estimates how much digital information is zipping around (hint: a lot) finds that for the first time, there's not enough storage space to hold it all. Good thing we delete some stuff.
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The lives of thousands of Holocaust victims are coming to light in a new database that allows anyone with an Internet connection to research the fate of family members and friends sent to Nazi death camps.
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Blog: A database shoots out an email solicitation using the name of a friend in the hospital
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The Story: Even when there?s good news on the security front, there always seems to be bad news to balance it out. And while we think this news is important for you to know, it?s not an exception to the Good News/Bad News Syndrome.[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]                                                    The use of e-mail-borne executable virus attachments dropped sharply in 2007. In particular, spammers have dialed back their use of so-called image spam, which tricks filters by embedding text within an attached image.According to IronPort Systems, outbreaks of viruses embedded in e-mail attachments totaled 860 in 2006 and 844 in 2005. But as of mid-October 2007, attacks totaled just 360. Dave Mayer, an IronPort product manager, said it?s likely that outbreaks will total 450 by the end of the year ? a drop of 47 percent. It appears that evildoers are moving on: ?Traditional viruses have been around for years, a long enough time to harden defenses against malicious attachments,? he said.Earlier in the year, IronPort, Symantec, and McAfee all noted that image spam, which appeared about two years ago, is waning, now that defenses have improved. Filters have now gotten better at scanning the contents of the attachments, leading spammers to link instead to images elsewhere.Mayer, whose company specializes in e-mail and Web security, says spammers are now placing those images on free photo-sharing sites ? the ones people use to send vacation photos to friends and family ? and embedding links to those images in their junk messages. These are difficult for spam filters to block because the same sites are used for legitimate photos as well.But as the abuse of e-mail attachments has declined, other types of threats have escalated. For example, outbreaks of macro viruses, aimed at Office-type applications, have risen by 50 percent to 60 percent while URL viruses climbed by at least 250 percent this year, IronPort found.The Bottom Line: It often seems as if the number of threats that you must be on guard against only increases, stretching your resources past the limits. But the truth is that threat profiles change over time, and some things you may be investing in are no longer as great a threat or are now handled by the tools you have in place. So, although you can?t get lax about security, you can focus more on newer threats.Complete list of 2007 underreported tech stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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Mass-mailing Zafi-D worm, which disguises itself as a Christmas greeting, is infecting more than one in every ten emails. The worm, which spreads in a file attached to email messages containing the text âHappy
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Administaff, a provider of human resources services, is notifying 159,000 former and current workers that personal data about them was on a laptop reported missing on Oct. 3. The data was unencrypted.
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The mishandling of Babbage's baggage Column The relaunch of the IT History Society (formerly the Charles Babbage Foundation) exposes a problem which the Web has brought to journalism and historians - stuff is not being preserved. There are people, however, who are trying to build proper records of the past.â¦
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For someone like Gordon Gould, a self-described e-mail packrat who never seems to trash anything that falls into his inbox, the idea of e-mail with a seemingly infinite amount of storage was a dream come true.
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typically e-mailed as enticements to bogus sites that endanger users&#39; systems and expose their personal information -- is limited in scope
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A new MessageLabs report says more than 86% of the E-mail it sampled in June was spam--and nearly one in 10 contained a virus.
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Richard Thomas comments on a "funny little PHP 'virus'" that he's noticed coming to him via emails:   Got an email that claimed to be from my host, it used a generic return address and talked about security upgrades and such and how due to new policy to help keep a secure data center I was required to upload and run 1 of 2 files in a zip attachment, the first was a php file the other was an asp file.   Of course, it wasn't from the host, so he investigated a little further to find out exactly what was going on with the file. Basically, it was a modified nsTView file with some added emailing and password discovery code. The code was "hidden" though - through a base64_encode call on one side and then decoded it on the other to cause the server to execute the code. He even posts and example of what the base64ed code might look like.
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A mass e-mail purporting to be a plea for aid for victims of last month's tsunami is actually a vehicle for spreading a computer virus, according to Web security firm Sophos.
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Blog: E-mail supposedly from the I.R.S. hides a malicious attached file.
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Blog: Interest in digital documents continues with a New York state bill proposing to study preservation of electronic documents.
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This scenario is all too familiar to office workers who collaborate electronically on projects: E-mails get passed around with differing versions of documents-in-progress attached. Instant messages whizz by. Web sites are cited, then lost. It's often a jumbled mess, with no central online location for shared data. There must be a better way.
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The product is designed to let companies manage years of e-mail messages on a single networked storage system.