News for December 5

GCN: Virtualization: Another aspect of green IT

by Rutrell Yasin

As federal and state information technology managers develop strategies and deploy technologies to reduce power consumption in their facilities, they recognize virtualization does not only reduce server sprawl, it can also save energy.

The spotlight was on the benefits of virtualization and its impact on data center and server consolidation this week at The Green Computing Summit. The Summit was held by 1105 Government Information Group, parent company of Government Computer News.

Virtualization can make a single physical resource, such as a server, operating system or storage device, appear to function as multiple resources. Or it can make multiple physical resources appear as a single resource.

Server consolidation is what got Fulton County, Ga., into virtualization, but now the county is reaping benefits in training, testing, high availability/disaster recovery and eventually in virtual desktop infrastructure, said Jay Terrell, chief technology officer and deputy director of IT for the county.

The county has more than 200 Wintel servers, dozens of Unix/Linux systems, midrange and mainframes systems and 6,000 PCs. IT supports about 5,500 end users and 42 departments, he said during a session on virtualization and moving beyond consolidation.

TheRegister: Firefox plug-in Trojan harvests logins

by John Leyden

Virus writers have latched onto the popularity of Firefox with a new variant on the established practice of stealing online banking passwords.

A password pinching Trojan that poses as a Firefox Plugin is doing the rounds, Romanian security firm BitDefender warns. ChromeInject-A is typically downloaded onto Windows PCs already compromised by other strains of malware.

Once installed, the Trojan sits in Firefox's Plugin folder, activating every time the popular browser is started. The backdoor code looks for data exchanged between a compromised machine and a list of pre-programmed banking sites in Europe, Australia and the US.

Harvested login credentials are captured and subsequently posted to a server located in Russia.

More details on the bank sites targeted, along with the general behaviour of the Trojan, can be found in a write-up by BitDefender here.

BitDefender reports that incidents of the malware are "very low", so the attack is more notable for its novelty than its potency. Malware that capitalises on the popularity of Firefox is rare, but not unprecedented.

CNet: Google slows N.C. data center growth

by Stephen Shankland

As a result of slowing plans for data center expansion, Google has turned down a $4.7 million economic development grant from North Carolina that would have funded computer facility plans in the state, according to report Thursday.

Google was awarded the grant in 2007 for creating 210 jobs and spending $600 million over four years as a result of the data center in Lenoir, N.C., according to a story in the Triangle Business Journal. But the Internet giant withdrew its application Thursday after establishing one data center with 50 employees and putting construction of a second building on hold after completing only its outer shell.

Google didn't like all the terms of the grant, and "recent volatile economic conditions make business planning even more difficult," the company told the state in a letter, according to another report in the News & Observer. A state committee approved Google's withdrawal, that report said.