Calling Baghdad

On Friday, the U.S. occupation authority in Baghdad is expected to award licenses to set up wireless phone networks in Iraq. As telecommunications companies prepare for their first major entry into the post-war country, at least one consortium is betting that its long-standing ties to Iraq and the region will give it a winning edge.

Calling itself IrakCell, the group is led by Lebanese cell phone operator LibanCell. IrakCell is backed by two prominent Iraqi families, said Mike McAdams, a Washington-based attorney who brought the parties together.

LibanCell has been running a global satellite phone network in Lebanon since 1995, McAdams said. The company has about 400,000 subscribers and annual revenues of about $400 million, he said, noting that its dealings in Lebanon have given it experience in bringing phone service to war-torn areas.

IrakCell is backed by the Shamara and Maymana family groups, which McAdams said have run businesses in Iraq before and after the U.S.-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein's Baath party government.

McAdams said he thought the outfit's makeup-"an Arab cell phone provider in large extent owned by Iraqis"-and the fact that it intends to employ Iraqi labor, would give it a distinct advantage over other competitors, which don't have as strong ties to the country. Two European phone giants also are leading bidding groups.

IrakCell is relying on at least one well-known Western company to improve its chances of winning, though. Cellular giant Motorola will provide phones that would run on LibanCell's network, McAdams said.

The award by the U.S. occupation authority is simply a grant to set up shop in Iraq-not a guarantee of business. Three regional licenses will be let, and IrakCell has bid on all of them, McAdams said. He asserted that the group could tally up about 400,000 subscribers in two years, the length of the license.

IrakCell will offer airtime to Iraqis at 15 cents a minute. McAdams said he didn't know how the lack of electricity in the country would affect cell phone use-including the ability of customers to recharge their phone batteries-but he noted that the group was prepared to bring its own generators to Iraq to run its operations.

McAdams is the general counsel for the Amira Group, a firm with long-standing ties to Iraq. The company began business in the early 1960s making heaters and air conditioners, and over the course of nearly three decades diversified into oil and natural gas production and personal computer manufacturing.

Following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, however, Amira's business collapsed in the wake of a United Nations-imposed trade embargo. The company abandoned its Iraqi facilities and focused on venture capital financing. Today, Amira is billing itself as a one-stop shop for companies looking to get into business in post-Hussein Iraq. The consultancy introduces foreign firms to Iraqi partners and groups, and publicizes companies' work once they've landed on the ground.

Why SoBig?

As the massive, message-generating SoBig worm, which has been slithering through the Internet at lightning speed, prepares to stop propagating itself on Sept. 10, federal officials and security experts are busy trying to track down the worm's author and figure out why it was unleashed.

The going theory among the experts, some of whom are cooperating with an investigation led by the FBI and the Homeland Security Department, is that an organized crime outfit may have created SoBig to harvest credit card numbers and usernames and passwords from infected computers, without their owners' knowledge. Since SoBig also scours its victims' e-mail address books and hard drives for addresses to send itself to, officials are speculating that the authors may also be involved in fraudulent commercial activities and scams using spam.

Ken Dunham, a worm and virus analyst with Reston, Va.-based iDEFENSE, said SoBig was a "multi-stage, sequentially planned attack" that was "highly organized and geared towards identity and banking theft as well as using compromised computers for sending out spam."

Dunham and Eric Kwon, the president of computer security firm Global Hauri, both agreed that the significant modifications the SoBig author made to the previous five variants of the worm that had previously been released indicate that someone had spent a large amount of time making sure the worm worked effectively. That stands in contrast to the commonly held image of worm and virus writers as disaffected pranksters who spend a few weeks creating a worm that does little real damage in order to garner attention, in the news media or among fellow hackers. SoBig's creator, or creators, experts fear, is interested in economic crime, not celebrity.

Lucent's Loss, Homeland Security's Gain

The Homeland Security Department has tapped a veteran of the research and development field to head its newly formed research and development outfit, the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency.

David Bolka, an MIT graduate and retired Navy captain, most recently served as a vice president for special projects at Lucent Technologies. Bolka also worked at AT&T's Bell Laboratories, highly regarded for its rich R&D history. He also was a project manager for Naval Sea Systems Command during his 26-year stint with the service.

Technology companies are eager to see how the new R&D unit spends the hundreds of millions of dollars the Bush administration has set aside to fund creation of new counterterrorism devices. Bolka's former employer, Lucent, is among them.

The company has had little luck expanding its homeland security business. In June, Lucent hired Phil Anderson, the former director of homeland security for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, to lead its new security business unit. Anderson has advised the White House on national security issues and once worked for Intellibridge Corp., the consulting firm that employed former CIA Deputy Director John Gannon, who advised the Homeland Security Department on intelligence matters before it officially opened its doors in March.