Alastair Revell has been appointed a membership assessor for BCS The Chartered Institute for IT. The role involves assessing applications for membership of the chartered body with other assessors and conducting interviews with applicants seeking registration as Chartered IT Professionals (CITP).

The process for becoming a Chartered IT Professional (CITP) was revised last year and now involves a three stage process, including a test of the candidate’s breadth of knowledge as a senior IT professional, a review of their professional work and an online interview with a presentation made by the candidate on their recent work.

The latest revision of the process now also includes the issue of a Certificate of Current Competence, which lasts for five years and needs to be renewed after this period. The certificate is akin to a practice certificate that is used in other professions, such as the Law.

Registration as a Chartered IT Professional (CITP) is on a par with other chartered professions, such as Chartered Accountants and Chartered Surveyors by virtue of the Royal Charter granted to BCS The Chartered Institute for IT in 1984. Candidates usually need between eight and ten year’s experience before they can apply, although formal education can reduce the amount of experience required to a minimum of five years.

Alastair Revell has also recently become a member of BCS Elite (Effective Leadership in IT). BCS Elite is the United Kingdom’s lead forum for IT Directors and Senior Managers to exchange experiences, views and expectations on how information systems should be managed to achieve business objectives. Membership is reserved to those with overall responsibility for the management of IT. Board level individuals from the IT supply and service industries and the academic and consultancy communities play a part in the Elite programme.

We would encourage everyone to vote for their favourite information pioneer at http://pioneers.bcs.org.

The web site vote is being organised by BCS The Chartered Institute for IT and is aimed at raising awareness of the various contributions made by people that have shaped the ICT industry in the broadest sense.

Pioneers include Alan Turing; Ada, Countess of Lovelace and Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Even Sir Clive Sinclair currently appears on the leader board at present.

Microsoft formally launched the next generation of their Office family of products today, including Microsoft Office 2010, Sharepoint 2010, Project 2010 and Visio 2010.

It will be interesting to see what traction these new products will get in the corporate space.

McAfee have posted help on how to resolve issues on computers that have been affected by the DAT5958 problem that has caused problems world-wide on 21st April 2010.

The McAfee KnowledgeBase article is at:-

https://kc.mcafee.com/corporate/index?page=content&id=KB68780

DAT5959 is now available from McAfee.

More information about the issues are on this blog.

Readers may also be interested in our Managing Consultant's take on this incident, which will be syndicated to IT Director tomorrow.

As an update to our earlier posts:-

McAfee DAT 5959
Major Issues with McAfee AntiVirus DAT5958
McAfee VirusScan Enterprise with DAT 5958 on Windows XP SP3 Machines

McAfee have now released DAT5959 to their web site at http://www.mcafee.com/apps/downloads/security_updates/dat.asp.

We advise caution in apply this update, suggesting that it  should be trialled first on test machines before generally being rolled out.

We understand that McAfee has released DAT5959, which is identical to DAT 5958 that is causing machines world-wide to crash, except is does not contain the "problem".

We believe this DAT was released at 10:15 PDT (GMT-7), although is does not appear to have been posted to the McAfee/NAI web sites as at the time of this post. We presume that this is initially being rolled out to the McAfee update network.

Further to our earlier advisory this afternoon, we now understand that McAfee have suspended DAT 5958 from their update network.

In a circular email, McAfee have stated:-

The 5958 DAT has been removed from McAfee download servers, preventing any further impact to corporate customers. McAfee teams are working with the highest priority to support impacted customers and plan to provide an update virus definition file shortly.

McAfee have provided more details on their web site and on the McAfee Community Web Site. These sites are currently running slowly because of the huge demands being placed on them at present.

Anecdotal reports being picked up by us show huge number of sites being affected world-wide, some with thousands of machines being affected.

Our current understanding is that this only affects Windows XP SP3 machines.

We are receiving reports that McAfee's AntiVirus DAT5958 is causing Windows XP SP3 machines to fail.

Early indications are that this latest update detects svchost.exe as Win32/wecorl.a causing affected machines to crash.

We are aware of whole sites being taken down. Our advice is not to update to DAT5958 and to switch off the autoupdate feature in McAfee VirusScan Enterprise.

The next event being held by the South West branch of BCS The Chartered Institute for IT, is on "Mobile Phone Security: Key Challenges for 2010 and Beyond" and will be presented by Alan Goode of Goode Intelligence.

The presentation will be given in the Stonehouse Lecture Theatre, Portland Square at the University of Plymouth on Tuesday, 9th March 2010 at 7:30pm. The free event is open to non-members of the BCS and represents a good opportunity for IT professionals to network with each other.

More details and registration details are available on the branch's web site.

Microsoft released MS10-002 at 18:00 GMT today, which patches the exploit that saw Google hacked. Code that exploits the flaw that this patch fixes is already in circulation, so it is important that this patch is applied quickly.

Microsoft are also suggesting that users should upgrade to Internet Explorer 8, which they consider to be significantly more secure.

We would also advise Vista machine owners to apply all the latest patches for their operating system in light of the recent virus problems at the University of Exeter, which Alastair Revell blogged about recently.

It is going to be interesting to see what uses the public data being made available via www.data.gov.uk will be put to over the coming months.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, is expected to formally launch the web site tomorrow.