"Hugo Cornwall "The Hacker's handbook"" - читать интересную книгу автораcurrent share prices, deliberately delayed by 15 minutes, historic
price data, which can be charted by the user's own computer (typically an Apple or IBM PC) and historic 'morgue' type company news and analysis. Extensions of the service enable customers to examine accounts of companies in which they are interested. The bulk of the information is US-based, but can be obtained world-wide via packet-switching networks. All you need are the passwords and special software. Business Information Business information is usually about the credit-worthiness of companies, company annual reports, trading opportunities and market research. The biggest electronic credit data resource is owned by the international company Dun & Bradstreet: during 1985-86 it is due to spend г25m on making its data available all over Europe, including the UK. The service, which covers more than 250,000 UK businesses, is called DunsPrint and access is both on-line and via a viewdata front-end processor. Another credit agency, CNN Services, extensively used already by the big clearing banks, and with 3000 customers accessing information via viewdata sets, has recently also announced an extended electronic retrieval service for its own called Guardian Business Information A third UK credit service available electronically is called InfoLink. In addition, all UK companies quoted on the London Stock Exchange and many others of any size who are not, have a report and analysis available from ICC (InterCompany Comparisons) who can be accessed via on--line dial--up, through a viewdata interface and also by Datastream customers. Dun & Bradstreet also have an on--line service called KBE covering 20,000 key British enterprises. Prodigious quantities of credit and background data on US companies can be found on several of the major on--line hosts. A valid phone number, passwords and extracts from the operations manual of one of the largest US services, TRW--it has credit histories on 90 million people--sat on some hackers' bulletin boards (of which much more later) for over twelve months during 1983 and 1984 before the company found out. No one knows how many times hackers accessed the service. According to the Washington Post, the password and manual had been obtained from a Sears Roebuck national chain store in Sacramento; some hackers claimed they were able to alter credit records, but TRW maintain that telephone access to their systems is designed for read-only operations alone, updating of files taking place solely on magnetic tape. US market research and risk analysis comes from Frost Sullivan. Risk analysis tells international businessmen which countries are politically or economically unstable, or likely t become so, and so unsafe to do business with. I once found myself accessing a viewdata-based international assessment service run b a company |
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