The problem with SSDs is that they use a variety of algorithms to place data within the array of storage locations, for example to ensure that all of the locations are used evenly (wear levelling) to maximise the useful life of the device.

Consequently, recovering data from a corrupted or non-critically damaged device can be very time-consuming. But Kroll Ontrack officials claim the company has developed proprietary techniques that improve the quality of recovery and reduce the time needed to less than a quarter.

"SSDs have much larger storage capacities than other types of flash storage and the cost per gigabyte is falling rapidly," said Adrian Briscoe, general manager - APAC, Kroll Ontrack.

"As a result, SSDs are increasingly used in data centres and personal devices, with the value of the data contained on them also increasing. The development of SSD recovery capabilities underline the Kroll Ontrack commitment to pioneering data recovery techniques for new and challenging forms of storage media and ensures our capabilities continue to be in line with the needs of our customers."

OK, so it's really just coincidence that this month, Patch Tuesday aligns with Valentine's Day. But if you were planning a special evening with your sweetie, you'll should also carefully plan the deployment of this month's updates - it's not the day to say you've been held up at the office.

Or, if you're in a time zone similar to Australia's or New Zealand's, don't make too big a night of it, because those patches will be waiting when you get to work on Wednesday morning.

There will be nine bulletins issued this month. Four are critical, and affect all currently supported versions of Windows. Internet Explorer, the .NET framework, and Silverlight are also implicated.

The remaining five are rated important, and concern Windows, the Visio Viewer 2010, and SharePoint 2010.

The bulletins are scheduled for release around 10am on February 14, US PST.

Scheduled to ship next month, the Fuji Xerox Printers Phaser 7800 has impressive specifications including true 1200 x 2400 dpi resolution, paper sizes up to A3/tabloid, Pantone colour calibration, genuine PostScript 3, duplexing, and up to 45 pages per minute.

Two paper trays are standard, and three more can be added for additional capacity or to accommodate multiple paper sizes or types. Various optional finishers support stacking, multi-position stapling, folding, punching, and booklet making.

The Phaser 7800 uses Fuji Xerox's proprietary S-LED (scanning LED) print head and EA Eco toner.

Prices start at $6999.

If that's too much printer for you, the company also announced the Phaser 6700 colour laser (A4, 1200 x 2400 dpi, duplex) starting at $3499, and the WorkCentre 3550 monochrome laser multifunction device (A4, 600 dpi, duplex) starting at $1099.

A NAB spokesperson today confirmed that the technology problems saw some people unable to use ATMs, Eftpos, internet or telephone banking. The outage also affected the HiCAPs network which is used for medical payments.

According to the bank NAB systems have been returning to full functionality since around 1pm.

However those customers whose transactions failed during the period the computer systems were down will have to wait until tomorrow before their account details are brought up to date.

The bank said it recognised and regretted the inconvenience to customers.

Earlier this week it was St George customers who were inconvenienced when the bank’s website crashed for several hours.

While holiday gifts previously stayed at home, now millions bring their Kindle Fires, Galaxy 2s, iPhone 4Ss or the newest Windows 7 phones into the office. As Australians came back from their summer breaks, IT departments probably received requests like:  I’d like my work email on this iPad, please. With that, CIOs and IT directors likely cringed, well-aware of the slate of security management issues that arise when additional devices gain access to workplace data.

What were once considered personal use devices are now expected to house work email accounts, company documents and spreadsheets. The “Consumerisation of IT” is prevalent, and while presenting new mobility opportunities for today’s employees, it has also created some serious IT headaches.

Not long ago, employees were issued a desktop computer, and maybe a printer. Hard drives stayed in one place and sensitive business intelligence always remained securely in the office. Even with the advent of mobile phones, data still stayed at work, as employees kept their own electronic devices and their work hardware separate.

The smartphone really didn’t raise any alarms at first, as email accounts were typically housed on the staid and trusty Blackberry. Seen as just another rugged business tool, like your 15-year-old landline, it could be easily wiped and closely monitored by IT heads. Really, it was the iPhone that signaled a change in the game. With its easy email access, a simpler interface, greater accessibility, and immense popularity, it represented some of the first “bring your own technology to work” devices.

The effects of new, powerful devices were magnified by cheap and widely available data plans. No longer were employees tethered to servers or company wi-fi; they had quick access to email and work documents practically anywhere. While it has allowed employees to work from all over the country, it’s also made smartphones susceptible to breaches and quick downloading of personal data.

Also, the explosion of mobile devices had led to a proliferation of several popular operating systems, leaving CIOs and IT departments to deal with software that all function differently. iOS, Android, Windows, Symbian and Blackberry are all widely used. Now, being an expert on one class of devices isn’t enough – IT departments need a functional knowledge of all the popular operating systems and how to work them into the enterprise.

Ultimately, the loss of control is what’s most worrying to IT departments. When everything is standardised, IT heads can lever a substantial amount of influence over accessibility and security. They can specify when files can be retrieved, turn off access, and wipe phones when they’re misplaced. They also can become fantastically literate on a specific piece of hardware or operating system.

But because of the enormous productivity benefits of letting employees access email and company files anywhere, it’s really left to the IT department to adapt. There are already a wide variety of solutions available to help manage the additional risks that come with at-home devices. Mobile Device Management (MDM) software helps companies monitor, manage and secure mobile devices within one network, reducing support costs and limiting risk. End-point security solutions specifically secure devices against malware, intrusion and data loss, both on and off the company network. Updated remote management and data wipe software can lock access to specific data or remove it completely in case of a lost or stolen personal device. In general, as mobile devices to continue to advance, so will the technology IT departments use to manage them.

Furthermore, standardisation of certain file formats and the convergence of mobile and desktop operating systems, signified by updates to iOS and Android, will allow for smoother transitions to consumer technology. IT should weather the storm: Be wary of new devices and ensure that employees are using the devices full raft of security features.

Michael Harman is a director at Datacom, a Sydney based IT services provider

F5 Networks has added support for popular virtual desktop infrastructure products to its BIG-IP application delivery controllers. Citrix XenDesktop, VMware View, and Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure are among those supported.

According to company officials, the product improves VDI delivery in several ways.

A combination of TCP optimisation, server load reductions and quality of service management (including support for Multi-Stream ICA) improves the user experience and delivers improved performance.

BIG-IP helps support high availability and scalability through intelligent traffic management, improves security by allowing the application of unified access and security policies, is easily deployed and managed, and reduces the cost of VDI deployments.

VDI support is provided by in version 11 of BIG-IP products, including BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager, BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager, BIG-IP Access Policy Manager, and BIG-IP Edge Gateway. Certain features, including support for Citrix Multi-Stream ICA require version 11.1y. No additional licensing is required to support VDI.

"BIG-IP products are unique in that they integrate authentication, directory services, SSL offloading, and other services throughout the desktop infrastructure so organisations can optimise virtual desktop delivery with fewer resources, while also supporting network and application access control for non-VDI enabled applications," said Kurt Hansen, F5 Networks' managing director for Australia and New Zealand.

This time last year, Ingres's Vectorwise set a new TPC-H benchmark record that was 3.4 times faster than the previous recordholder despite running on the same hardware. Certain queries can be processed almost 80 times faster by Vectorwise than conventional databases.

In September 2011, Ingres changed its name to Actian, and announced a new line of activity. Action Apps would, the company said, allow massive databases to be combined with publicly available feeds such as Twitter to drive lightweight, easy to use apps, especially in the BI area.

Actian has now announced Vectorwise Workgroup Edition to provide midsize organisations with access to Big Data analytics. The idea is to hit a price point well below that associated with enterprise products from IBM, Oracle or Teradata, while delivering far greater performance and ease of use than traditional database technologies.

Vectorwise Workgroup Edition is priced from $US9900.

"Mid-market organisations and Workgroups have business challenges that require enterprise-class technology" said Actian CEO Steve Shine. "Yet, they don't have enterprise-sized resources in the way of IT staff or large budgets for projects, especially uncertain ones. They for sure don't have a lot of time to play around with technology.

CONTINUED

"Vectorwise Workgroup Edition allows these organisations to leverage the same analytic firepower that's available to the enterprise in order to increase the performance of their business and seize upon new revenue streams with extraordinarily modest hardware requirements."

Jason Leonidas, Actian's VP of sales in Australia, noted that SMEs are an important part of the Australian economy, but powerful analytics have previously been out of their price range.

"Most SMEs and Workgroups are running on the Windows platform. There are over 100,000 business in Australia with an annual turnover between $2M and $100M, accounting for $16B of our economy. Vectorwise Workgroup Edition for Windows allows customers to get the benefit of a specialised analytical database without the need to go to expensive high end solutions. Remember, all large enterprises were once small and then medium businesses".

Hitachi's Ultrastar SSD400S.B family of SSDs use 25 nanometre SLC NAND flash memory technology for reliability over a long life.

Using enterprise-grade flash memory from Intel, the new drives are offered in 100GB, 200GB and 400GB models. The 400GB unit is said to be good for up to 35TB of random writes, "the equivalent of writing 19.2TB/day for five years" according to Hitachi officials.

The drives are packaged with 2.5in 6Gbps SAS interfaces, and include proprietary endurance firmware and power management techniques. A self-encrypting option is available to provide greater security and the ability to effectively erase a drive simply by erasing the onboard key.

HItachi GST is in the process of being acquired by Western Digital.

Ingenyes, the web hosting operation that's trying a new business model has widened the range of services it offers.

The new additions are a customisable e-commerce solution from $12 per month, a website builder from $AUD8.00 per month, and a white-label reseller program aimed at web designers who want "big profit margins" with hosting starting at $39 per month.

"We're very excited to now offer a flexible e-commerce solution with flat annual fee regardless of how many products, disk space or bandwidth a customer's website is running with," said founder and CEO Anoosh Manzoori.

Ingenyes also offers domain name registration services starting at $13.99 per year for .com names, including privacy registration, registry lock and DNS management.

In four months, Ingenyes has acquired over 1000 customers in more than 20 geographical markets.

The company still offers hosting plans including cPanel and Fantastico starting at $0 (ie, free) for 50GB of disk space and 10GB of bandwidth.

According to M86 Security Labs, the second half of 2011 saw spam and malware campaigns on Facebook going viral by tempting users with gift cards and other rewards. The report stated "the key issue for end users is not to automatically trust these sorts of notifications. They can quickly check for fraud by hovering the mouse over the link to reveal its destination."

A common Facebook scam is to offer a gift voucher or similar as an incentive to complete a survey. The surveys are real and the scammers receive commissions for each person that participates, but the gift vouchers are non-existent. Brands associated with these scams included Costco, Starbucks and JB Hi-Fi.

Another trick is using similar bait to dupe people to agreeing to receive premium SMS services. The moral is that you should always read the fine print carefully, especially when giving someone your mobile number.

While the overall volume of email spam fell during the period (it's now around 70% rather than the 90% or so seen in 2010), the proportion of malicious spam soared from 1% to 5%. Rather than using malicious attachments, spammers are increasingly sending malicious links that ultimately deliver exploit kits. 95.1% of those links are associated with the Blackhole exploit kit.

Beware of shortened URLs - M86 warned they were used in up to 10% of spam. The use of obscure public shorteners or private shorteners is becoming common, so take particular care if you encounter one.

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Still on the mass attack theme, M86 noted that almost half (49.2%) of the world's malicious web content is served from the US, followed by Russia (6.0%), Germany (5.9%) and China (4.5%).

At the other end of the scale, highly targeted attacks are still taking place. The use of stolen or faked digital certificates helps allay suspicions, and the malware used does not spread automatically, so there's less chance it will be detected.

In an announcement today, Blue Coat (makers of a variety of web security and WAN optimisation products) has added the ability to scale and optimise the bandwidth consumed by encrypted Adobe Flash video streams.

By identifying and isolating video streams within wide area network links (including Internet access), Blue Coat's MACH5 product offers stream-splitting, pre-population and advanced video caching technologies to scale the use of live or on-demand internal corporate video steams, as well as external web video, with minimal impact upon the user.

The outcome is that tasks of greater importance may continue to consume the connection, unimpeded by video.  Essentially, this is the opposite of most QoS services - instead of giving priority to nominated important streams, it is removing priority from a nominated 'unimportant' stream.

"Most companies want to significantly increase their use of internal video for training and communication but are limited by the capacity constraints of their existing WAN links to branch offices," said Bruce Bennie, Managing Director, Blue Coat Australia and New Zealand. "Blue Coat removes most of the network impact associated with video by fully integrating video optimisation with our MACH5 WAN optimisation solution to accelerate a full range of business traffic, including Web, cloud and video applications. With the new capability, 100 users watching a video will only have the same impact on the network as one user."

An existing capacity to optimise Flash, Silverlight, HTML5 and other video streams has now been enhanced by the ability to optimise RTMPe and RTMPte encrypted Flash, thus giving a stronger focus to managing DRM-controlled content.

Epson's GT-S55 and GT-S85 scanners are designed for scanning documents into business systems, and are rated at up to 25ppm and 40ppm respectively. Both sides of a page can be scanned in one pass, so that's a maximum of 50ipm (images per minute) or 80ipm.

Features include no warm-up delay and low power consumption.

The automatic document feeder takes anything from a business card to A4, and a wide range of features are provided through software. They include dual image output (two files with different parameters such as format and resolution from one scan), edge fill (to correct any shadowing around the document), text enhancement, automatic processing of text as black-and-white and pictures as halftone, enhancement of specific colours (eg, blue or red ink) when scanning in black-and-white, colour dropout (automatic removal of a single colour to remove backgrounds or overstamps), and automatic orientation according to the text on the page.

NewSoft Presto! PageManager, ABBYY Fine Reader Sprint Plus, and Presto! BizCard Reader are included with the scanners. Windows and Mac OS X are supported.

The software includes 'scan to' functionality (eg, scan to email or to SharePoint) and a driver that allows integration with other applications.

List prices are $999 for the GT-S55 and $1299 for the GT-S85.

UXC Connect reckons organisations can benefit from the trend to BYOD, but warns there's no sense adopting a head in the sand mentality. "It really is already here," company CFO Wayne Banks told a Melbourne audience this morning, and described the "post Christmas spike" of people bringing newly acquired devices to work and thinking "wouldn't it be great if..."

The problem is that BYOD has many implications in terms of security, governance, finance, and human resources issues. Indeed, Mr Banks suggested that BYOD is really 80% about governance and only 20% about technology.

Not all of the financial issues around BYOD are easily measured, as they include productivity, the ability to attract and retain staff, and procurement and asset management. On the technical side, there may be a need to upgrade network infrastructure (especially if most of your existing internal connectivity is via Ethernet rather than Wi-Fi) as well as increased demand for virtualisation in the data centre.

Rather than trying to treat all employees alike, Mr Banks recommended dividing them into categories, and then applying policies appropriate to each group. At UXC Connect there are four groups:

• 'Big Cheese' - senior executives that need access to the most sensitive data, and who receive company-paid and company-managed devices.
• 'Nomads' - such as salespeople, where the company meets most or all of their device purchase and running costs.
• 'Flex Workers' - those who spend some time away from their desks, possibly working from home on some days, and therefore the company meets some of their mobile costs.
• 'Desk jockeys' - deskbound employees using exclusively corporate systems (eg, payroll clerks) are not allowed to BYOD, and therefore receive no subsidies.

Page 2: Policy and more

There are several policy issues that need to be considered within this framework. Which party is responsible for particular aspects of BYOD such as backup, the use of home PCs, and paying global roaming charges?

What happens if a device is lost or stolen? Is it acceptable for the employer to initiate a complete remote wipe, or should only corporate data be deleted?

Is the employer entitled to access the location of the device (eg, via the built-in GPS)? It may be useful for dispatching the nearest field worker or for finding a mislaid device, but the ability to track people going about their work may cause concern.

Do employees have free rein in selecting a BYOD, or should they be pick from a list of acceptable devices (or specifications, in the case of notebooks)?

UXC Connect's internal BYOD pilot is aimed at increasing productivity through operational innovation, attracting and retaining staff, and enhancing mobile productivity and workspace innovation, Mr Banks said.

The pilot allows only Apple devices (MacBooks running a mixed Mac OS X/Windows environment, iPads and iPhones) managed by the company's mobile device management system and using virtual desktops to access corporate/legacy systems.

Page 3: 'Trust but verify'

Developing a functional profile of users based on their mobile work style "is key to making this [BYOD] work," said Mr Banks, who also suggested the role of the CFO is to build a "trust but verify" culture.

He recommended organisations start planning their BYOD strategy now (if they haven't already), and that the CEO, CIO, CFO and HR director should all be involved in that process. In particular, the question of storing corporate data on privately owned devices must be addressed, including issues such as backup and password-strength rules.

Don't delay that planning process, he advised: BYOD is here to stay, and "it's only going to get bigger."

As more and more privately owned devices are brought into the workplace, more of your corporate data will find their way onto them. The subsequent introduction of a management regime for mobile devices may close the stable door, but those particular horses will already have bolted.

The four set up a company to offer UNIX advice and develop software. The name SuSE was an acronym for the German for software and systems development.

The company today announced that it would showcase major historical milestones and discuss plans for the future through a series of events that will include SUSECon 2012.

In 1994, the first version of SuSE was released 1.0; two years later came version 4.2, the first to be developed entirely by the company rather than merely translated.

Six years later, came SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, the first globally distributed, fully supported Linux server operating system for businesses.

In subsequent years, SUSE has released SUSE Studio for creation of custom images, SUSE Manager, a Linux server management solution, and its own verstion OpenStack, powered cloud infrastructure solution.

And, of course, one must not forget the community distribution OpenSUSE set up in 2005.

SUSE was bought by Novell in 2003 and the years that followed were not exactly the greatest in its history.

Now, back as an autonomous unit, and with one of its founders, Hubert Mantel, returning to the company, it will be looking to regain some of the glory it enjoyed when it was the most widely used GNU/Linux distribution in Europe.

Last year, Novell was purchased by Attachmate Corporation which took it private. SUSE now functions as an autonomous unit from Nuremberg.

The upcoming 12.04 release will be the last that the company supports financially.

The news was broken on Monday by Jonathan Riddell, a developer who is employed by Canonical and works on Kubuntu.

According to him, the distribution has not been a commercial success and that is the reason why Canonical has come to this decision.

Kubuntu will now become a so-called community distribution, with Canonical offering infrastructure support as it does for other recognised derivatives such as Edubuntu and Xubuntu.

The decision focuses attention on the fact that Canonical is a business first and foremost, looking to balance the books at least by the time it turns 10. Ubuntu was first released in October 2004.

Ubuntu 12.04, otherwise known as Precise Pangolin, is due for release in April. A second alpha version is available for testing at the known but there are problems with the installer, at least as of yesterday.

Anyone with a TrendNet camera should URGENTLY turn it off until recently provided security patches are applied; note that these are generically described on the web site as a “critical firmware update.”  It might have been nice if the company was honest enough to admit the reason for the urgent update.

According to a blog posting from “someLuser,” TrendNet's cameras are vulnerable to an authentication bypass attack: although credentials are supposedly required to access the camera across the Internet, there is a very simple way to bypass this requirement.

Note that iTWire will not provide details of this method due to the extensive reports of privacy invasion (including nudity) upon unsuspecting users of the cameras, however a brief sampling of available links shows that well over half of them were currently unreachable.

As previously mentioned, TrendNet has already provided updated firmware to address the issue, but they appear to have no practical way to either push out the update nor an ability to target affected cameras.

Imperva's latest analysis of the hacking landscape shows that the bad guys know as much about your business as you do.

Based on surveys and analysis from the second half of 2011, "Imperva's Web Application Attack Report" paints either a glowing or a dismal assessment of the hacking landscape, depending on your perspective.

If you're a hacker, you should pat yourself on the back for a job well done.  It is becoming increasingly clear that you have studied your target and are prepared to focus clearly and accurately upon the way they do business.

According to the report, "We also investigated two types of Business Logic attacks: Email Extraction and Comment Spamming. Comment Spamming injects malicious links into comment fields to defraud consumers and alter search engine results. Email Extraction simply catalogs email addresses for building spam lists. These Business Logic attacks accounted for 14% of the analyzed malicious traffic. Email Extraction traffic was more prevalent than Comment Spamming. A full anatomy of BLAs is described in this report."

It is unfortunate (for the spammers and hackers) that most office workers are becoming wise to the typical intrusion attempts.  With this in mind, these same intruders are forced to understand their targets in more detail in order to complete their nefarious activities.

For instance, how many office workers would refuse to open an email from their boss?  Especially when it contains a spreadsheet called "bonus calculation."

The malware this email contains may-well be entirely unique in the history of malware - other vendors have told iTWire that according to their scanning systems in excess of 50% of malware is unique, that no other copy of the intrusion has ever been observed.

This IS an arms race and it is clear that in the past few months there has been a clear escalation.  In response to the rapid deployment of "next generation firewalls" by a number of vendors, the naughty lads of the Internet are becoming much more focused in their attacks.

May the joy of the Internet be upon you.

Testing composite systems involving multiple applications running on multiple systems is complicated. And time consuming. And expensive. And what happens if you need to test a public-facing system under loads that it only bears on one day per year?

Well, what if there was a way that you could implement changes to one subsystem and *know* that it still work with all the others, and test it under perhaps 100 times the normal load - completely independently of the rest of the system?

That's where CA subsidiary ITKO's LISA platform comes in. LISA can capture transactions passing between subsystems, and then simulate the rest of the system when a component is being tested. Sources of data include CA's Wily application performance management and NetQoS network performance management products.

This proves that the individual applications continue to work together despite the changes, and allows stress testing by increasing the rate at which the simulated load is played back.

John Michelson, ITKO's chief technology officer, told iTWire that giving software developers and testers access to LISA is like giving aircraft wing designers a wind tunnel rather than expecting them to attach a redesigned wing to a complete aircraft for testing. "It is a transformational technology," he said.

CONTINUED

Rather than needing to run a complete test environment, LISA replaces all but the component being tested with a virtualised service that realistically represents the rest of the system.

This allows the parallel development of the individual pieces of composite systems, and Mr Michelson noted that one telco had to change 38 interrelated systems before its LTE network could go live. Being able to develop and test each application separately telescopes the overall development time.

In such situations, LISA has the ability to compare the modelled behaviour with the actual behaviour when any new module goes live. The virtual services that represent the rest of the composite system to each component can then be updated without causing any disruptions.

It is also possible to model the effects of moving components to more or less powerful hardware, of changes to the performance of external systems such as credit card processing services: "the volatility of external applications confounds dev and test activities," said Mr Michelson.

For example, FedEx provides its customers with access to a LISA virtual service that they can use for testing their applications. The speed of the virtual service can be adjusted to represent the response of the real system at different times of day.

Using another analogy, Mr Michelson likened LISA to a flight simulator. Rather than trying to find a wide range of weather conditions in the real-world, pilots learn how to cope with those conditions in a simulator. Similarly, LISA can test applications under a wide range of conditions including the most arduous that are anticipated.

Other advantages include more successful integration (thanks to more thorough testing) and more effective outcomes.

CONTINUED

ITKO concentrates on the big end of town. Mr Michelson says that's because companies that are defined by their technology - notably banks and insurance companies - stand to gain the most value from LISA because of the size of their investment in software.

"If you solve it for the biggest companies in the world, you've solved it for the little guys," he observes. It makes commercial sense to address the top of the market first, as that makes it harder for potential competitors to gain a toehold.

The product could be useful to organisations with a few hundred developers, he said, "but we don't go looking for them." Instead, the company partners with dev/test specialists who can then introduce LISA to their clients.

Existing customers in Australia include the all of the big four banks - ANZ, Commonwealth, NAB and Westpac - Telstra, and Hydro Tasmania.

No local customers were available for comment, but according to Mr Michelson big US customers have found LISA can save them millions of dollars and slash 30% from the time needed to get a product up and running. The company's customers also include AT&T, Best Buy, Citigroup, General Motors, IBM, Intel, Kaiser Permanente, Lockheed Martin, Oracle, the US Army, the US Air Force, and Vodafone.

They follow release of Optus' NBN consumer plans in November last year and are designed for offices with up to five employees.

Broadband packages start from $59 per month and broadband and business phone bundles from $99 per month, available on a 12 or 24 month contract depending on the plan. All include a single user license for the Optus OfficeApps email and collaboration suite (resold Google Apps), webSMS, and a business domain name.

The $59 package offers up to 100GB of anytime data; $89 and $119 plans include 500GB and 1,000GB of data respectively. On the $99 business data and phone package, customers receive 500GB of data and unlimited standard calls to fixed line numbers and Optus mobiles within Australia. The $109 and $129 packages add unlimited calls to any mobile. They come with 500GB and 1,000GB of data respectively.

All these prices are for the "NBN Co second tier speed". Services at the third, fourth and highest speed tiers cost respectively $5, $10 and $20 per month extra and customers can switch tiers at any time during their contract.

Optus however is being very coy about revealing exactly what these speeds are (25/5, 25/10, 50/20 and 100/40Mbps). It does not even provide a link to the relevant information on the NBN Co web site, but instead simply suggests the type of usage for which each is best suited.

For example the NBN Co third tier speed (25/10Mbps) is best for "businesses who use the Internet regularly throughout the day to perform their day-to-day duties, and share connection between devices and people. An Optus spokesman told iTWire "We were trying to convey speed in a more meaningful way, and we were following the ACCC guidelines on talking about broadband speeds, when these are theoretical maximum speeds."

Rohan Ganeson, managing director for Optus SMB said: "When you consider that 48 percent of Australian SMBs don't have a website and only four percent are using cloud solutions such as web-hosted email2, there is a huge opportunity for small businesses to embrace digital technologies."

He added: "This is the first of many NBN packages Optus will offer to help small businesses make the most of the NBN to enhance and grow their business. As the rollout progresses, we'll expand our NBN packages to cater for larger offices and add more Optus OfficeApps inclusions to help businesses run their operations faster and smarter."

Optus said it would expand its range of consumer broadband and home phone bundles in March and introduce 24 month contract plans.

According to Arbor Networks' Seventh Annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report, "Ideology was the most common motivating factor for DDoS attacks in 2011, followed by a desire to vandalise...35 percent [of survey respondents] reported political or ideological attack motivation [and] 31 percent reported nihilism or vandalism as attack motivation."

Survey participants included 114 self-classified Tier 1, Tier 2 and other IP network operators from the US and Canada, Latin/South America, EMEA, Africa and Asia. More than 71 percent of respondents indicated that DDoS attacks toward end customers were a significant operational threat encountered during the 12-month survey period.

Roland Dobbins, Arbor Networks' solutions architect for Asia-Pacific, and the primary author of this year's report, said: "We are not seeing growth at the expense of extortion and the other motivations, we are seeing growth overall, but the majority of that growth is coming from ideologically motivated attacks and vandalism.

He warned: "Furthermore, the explosion of inexpensive and readily-accessible attack tools is enabling anyone to carry out DDoS attacks."

The report said also that respondents had experience a significant increase in the prevalence of large scale DDoS attacks in the 10Gbps range. "This represents the 'mainstreaming' of large flood-based DDoS attacks and indicates that network operators must be prepared to withstand and mitigate large flood attacks on a routine basis."

The largest attack reported was 60Gbps. "Attacks of this magnitude continue to constitute an extremely serious threat to network infrastructure and ancillary support services such as DNS, not to mention end-customer properties," the report said.

Respondents also reported the first IPv6 attacks, "This marks a significant milestone in the arms race between attackers and defenders, and confirms that network operators must have sufficient visibility and mitigation capabilities to protect IPv6-enabled properties," the report said.

It added: "This also indicates that much of theIPv6 network traffic may be un-monitored, masking the real threats on IPv6 networks."