Cyber intruders who gained access to an AS/400 at a water district were able to manipulate the flow of chemicals into the public water supply, Verizon says in its latest Data Breach Digest. While customers served by the water district were not harmed, the episode shows the potential consequences of failure to properly secure critical systems in an increasingly connected world.

Verizon dedicated five pages to laying out the disturbing breach of a water district that it referred to as Kemuri Water Company (KWC), which is not a real name. The water district had first contacted Verizon’s RISK Team to

Like most technology executives, Dean Foods CIO Brian Murphy has to balance his company’s wants and needs. Its JD Edwards ERP systems must be maintained, but at the same time, employees desire things that make their lives easier, such as a new email system. Murphy found a way to fit both items into his budget after shifting the JD Edwards maintenance and technical support duties from Oracle to Rimini Street.

Dean Foods is a longtime user of the IBM midrange server that’s gone by various names over its nearly four-decade run. The Dallas, Texas-based company is one of the

The best programmers, by their very nature, are lazy. Why write or buy something new when the function already exists? One of the most popular commercial tools that helps IBM i developers continue to be lazy is Pathfinder, a cross-reference and documentation utility developed by Hawkeye Information Systems. Now with support for RDi and free-form RPG, Pathfinder will help free a new class of developers from programming drudgery.

At its root, Pathfinder is a programming tool. The software was first developed to work with the IBM System/3 back in 1976, and has been brought forward to the IBM i

When does system monitoring become a big enough concern to an IBM i shop that specialized software would be considered? Often it’s when one person has the responsibility for monitoring multiple systems. It doesn’t really matter if the systems run on the same OS or if multiple platforms are involved. Multiple systems ratchet up the complexity. To take on the task, Maxava has stepped up its product development.

Available now is Maxava Monitor Mi8, a cloud-based, subscription-priced, system-monitoring software for IBM i. And within two to three months, it will add the capability to monitor Windows and Linux systems as

A new release of the ActiveBatch job scheduler from Advanced Systems Concepts contains new features that reduces the amount of job setup work by 50 percent, the company claims. The New Jersey software company, which supports the IBM i server with its job scheduler, also unveiled the results of a survey that demonstrates the importance of job scheduling to cloud, big data, and virtualization initiatives.

Among the enhancements in ActiveBatch version 10, which ASCI announced nine months ago and shipped in February, are a job library that contains hundreds of “production-ready” job templates that the company says enables developers to