Stories about: Pandemic

Many companies and government agencies are counting on legions of teleworkers to keep their operations running in the event of an influenza pandemic. But those plans may quickly run aground as millions of people turn to the Internet for news and even entertainment, potentially producing a bandwidth-choking surge in online traffic.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has created something akin to a Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale for calculating a pandemic's severity that includes some recommendations with implications for IT. Among them is a recommendation that companies consider telecommuting if the death toll in the U.S. from a flu epidemic rises to 90,000 people.

A young programmer approached Mary Finlay with a request: After just a year on the job, he wanted to work four 10-hour days so he could have every Friday off, a schedule that would allow him to play Thursday night gigs with his rock band without worrying about the next day's work.

Bob Worrall was promoted from vice president of IT to CIO of Sun Microsystems six weeks ago, filling a vacancy that arose when Bill Vass was named president and chief operating officer of Sun Microsystems Federal. Worrall, 45, has come a long way since his first major IT management position at Worlds of Wonder, the San Francisco Bay area toy company that created the popular Teddy Ruxpin animatronic teddy bear in the mid-1980s. He talked with Eric Lai this week about Sun's massive three-year ERP consolidation plans, as well as how Sun has prepared for the coming flu season.

An exploit in Microsoft PowerPoint was targeted in a zero-day attack by malware writers following last week's monthly security update.

Financial services firm KPMG has met with the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) and the big four Australian banks to push the adoption of industry-specific business continuity plans.

If a bird flu pandemic sweeps the nation, we could avoid infection by working from home via the Internet.

One of the best kept disaster recovery and business continuity secrets in the industry is not even on companies' radar: that's the failure to push teleworking for staff as an ideal fallback measure.

After boasting a 100-fold productivity improvement in the Australian Securities and Investments Commission's detection of investment scams using their creation, Sydney University researchers are turning their attention to the spam pandemic.

Australia may be an international laggard in terms of broadband take-up, but that hasn't stopped the Australian Communications Authority (ACA) taking to the world stage in an attempt galvanise a global counteroffensive to spam.

A warning about the security flaw identified last Monday in the zlib compression/decompression library affecting Linux systems has been broadened to include Windows and any other other operating systems that use the zlib code.