Neowin.net

A number of Macintosh dealers are suing Apple Computer, charging the computer maker with a host of business wrongs ranging from overbilling to poaching customers to stocking its own stores with new gear unavailable to resellers.

Three suits have been filed in recent months by Apple dealers, including San Francisco-based Macadam Computer, Los Angeles-based Computer International, and Oregon-based MacTech Systems. The resellers charge Apple with breach of its contract and fraud, saying the computer maker hurt their business by failing to pay them for repairs they made under warranty, by overcharging them for parts, and by disparaging the dealers to potential customers in an effort to gain more direct sales business.

An Apple representative declined to comment on the cases, which were filed over the past four months in Santa Clara Superior Court in San Jose, Calif. Apple has sought to have at least some of the cases moved to federal court, but the company has not addressed the specific allegations, according to court records. All three Mac dealers are represented by Marcus Merchasin, a San Francisco-based lawyer.

Source: CNet

Symantec found that, on average, companies experienced 30 attacks a week in the second half of 2002, compared with 32 in the first six months of the year, a 6 percent reduction. Symantec defined attacks as "individual signs of malicious activity."

In addition, the rate of severe events declined, with 21 percent of the companies that made up the sample suffering a severe event during the past six months, compared to 23 percent of companies in the six months before that and 43 percent of companies in the second half of 2001.

Severe events were defined by Symantec as "sequences of attack activity that have either caused a security breach on a company's network or present an immediate danger of a security breach if intervention is not taken."

While lower than the preceding six months, the average number of attacks per company in the final six months of 2002 was still 21 percent higher than for the same period in 2001.

Those numbers may get worse before they get better. Symantec documented more than 2,500 new vulnerabilities in 2002, an 81 percent increase from the number found in 2001. The number of moderate and high-severity vulnerabilities was almost 85 percent greater than in 2001.

While the increase in the number of software vulnerabilities may reflect increased media attention on the problem and the creation of more responsible disclosure policies in companies, new strategies for exploiting previously unrecognized weaknesses in software code may also be responsible.

The number and severity of the discovered vulnerabilities are fertile ground for new "blended threats" that leverage two or more different security flaws to execute an attack, Symantec said.