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Handspring Gets Boost
Handspring is getting financial help from Qualcomm, which announced in December that it is buying more than 1.8 million shares of Handspring common stock worth $10 million.
Also, Handspring announced a public offering of 7 million shares at $5.50 each. Proceeds will be used for “general corporate purposes,” which include capital expenditures, investments and acquisitions, Handspring officials said.
Hitachi Data Names CEO
Enterprise storage company Hitachi Data Systems in December announced Shinjiro Iwata as its new CEO and president.
At the same time, the company announced its goal of overtaking EMC, the biggest player in the data storage market, by 2004.
“I am very pleased to return to Hitachi Data Systems as CEO,” Iwata said in a statement. He previously was an executive vice president at the company.
The company will now focus on direct sales and global alliances, he said. HDS enters 2002 with momentum, including the announcement of its HiCommand storage management software and recent analyst reports that its storage products were winning deals against rivals.
Holiday Virus Hits PC Users
Happy #%& holidays. A week before Christmas, a holiday-themed virus began spreading on the Internet, likely catching many PC users unaware, security experts said.
The mass-mailing worm is variously known as W32.Reeezack and W32.Zacker and is spreading via Microsofts Outlook e-mail client and the MSN Messenger instant messaging client. Once resident on an infected machine, the worm changes the Internet Explorer start page to a malicious site that uses an IE exploit to create a VBScript file on the PC.
This script spreads the worm via shared network drives and deletes anti-virus files and any files in the Windows system directory. Reeezack arrives in the users e-mail in-box with a subject line of “Hii.”
The body reads:
“I cant describe my fellings
But all i can say is
Happy New Year :)
Bye.”
The attachment containing the worm is called Christmas.exe.