Sam Costello

A group of private sector organizations and government agencies will release Wednesday a new benchmark testing tool designed to let users and administrators more easily configure security settings on their Microsoft Corp. Windows 2000 systems.

McAfee Security, a division of Network Associates Inc., will announce updates to its line of security products in August, including its antivirus and personal firewall software, as well as its system cleaning tool.

Two security holes in a graphical user interface common on Unix and Linux systems from vendors such as IBM Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. could allow an attacker to launch a denial of service attack or overwrite files on affected systems, according to a new security bulletin released Wednesday by CERT/CC (the Computer Emergency Response Team/Coordination Center).

NetScreen Technologies Inc., a company that makes firewall and virtual private network hardware and software, announced this week that it had gained a major customer: Microsoft Corp.

WorldCom Inc.'s accounting scandal has thrown the company into such financial straits that it will not survive on its own, a Gartner Inc. analyst said Wednesday.

The wildfire of accounting controversies engulfing Enron Corp. and tech-sector companies such as WorldCom Inc. is scorching another company, according to a report Friday in the Wall Street Journal, which said that Xerox Corp. could have to restate its 1997 to 2001 earnings to the tune of more than US$6 billion.

A pair of security vulnerabilities in a suite of tools used to send encrypted traffic to servers could allow attackers to run code of their choice on affected servers or cause denial of service attacks, according to a handful of security alerts released Wednesday.

Users and antivirus vendors are questioning the seriousness of a virus announced last week by McAfee Security, a division of Network Associates Inc., as well as the manner in which McAfee doled out details about the virus.