Briefly noted

Australia opens national tsunami warning center

The Australian government has launched a $69.8 million Joint Australian Tsunami Warning Center, to be operated by the Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne and Geoscience Australia in Canberra. Australia will be the main beneficiary of the new center, but upgraded and expanded seismic monitoring will now extend to Indian Ocean countries including Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, India, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Mauritius, and Kenya.

Document requirements announced for visitors to international peace garden

U.S. citizens traveling to the International Peace Garden from within the United States will not be required to present a Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative compliant document when exiting the park southbound, upon full WHTI implementation on 1 June 2009. U.S. citizens traveling south upon exit from the Peace Garden who satisfactorily establish to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer that they entered the Peace Garden from the United States, will not be required to present a WHTI-compliant document.

European data breach laws could land in 2011

European data breach notification laws applying to all online information service providers could be in force by 2011, according to the European data protection supervisor Peter Hustinx. The current data breach notification proposals apply to just ISPs and telcos, but Hustinx backed calls for the law to apply to all “information service providers, including banks and medical sites”. He added, “I would welcome this as fair and in line with reality.”

Aberdeen: Unified threat management can shave IT costs

Keeping up with threats and vulnerabilities consumes about 14 percent of the average IT security budget. Aberdeen’s recent research in Vulnerability Management sheds new light on how organizations are keeping pace with the never-ending flow of threats and vulnerabilities to their networks, computers, and application software. The scale of the problem is massive: on average, industry sources reported more than 120 new vulnerability disclosures per week (nearly 90 percent of which could be exploited remotely over the network), and more than 400,000 new examples of malware (including viruses, worms, back doors, key loggers, trojans, spyware, and rootkits) were identified in the last calendar year.