Chiyoda Information Equipment has signed an agreement with Digital Pathways Inc to become the exclusive Japanese distributor of the US company’s Defender II system, which is designed to prevent the tapping of databases and host computers using telephone lines: the hacker attacker can stand guard over as many as 768 lines and is priced at between $24,000 and $160,000 according to the number of lines; Chiyoda hopes to sell 1,000 devices over the next three years into a Japanese security equipment market valued at some $40,000m a year; Chiyoda also wants to get into the line network auto connection market and into the fault-tolerant computer market.