Appropriately for a month that concludes with a holiday designed around scary things, October has been declared Cyber Security Awareness Month. President Obama recently signed a proclamation and urged everyone to back up files, keep Internet-surfing children safe, and "play an active role in securing the cyber networks we use every day." National Cyber Security Awareness Month is part of a campaign organized by the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) and backed by the Department of Homeland Security.

The government agency said, "America's competitiveness and economic prosperity in the 21st century will depend on effective cybersecurity." NCSA said October's designation is part of the first Global Online Safety Campaign, called STOP | THINK | CONNECT, which began Monday. The public-private partnership is intended to "help all digital citizens employ universal behaviors to protect themselves," the organization said.

 

(Source: NewsFactor Network)

Full story

NewsFactor Network

Nearly six-in-ten adults (58%) have done research online about the products and services they buy, and about a quarter (24%) have posted comments or reviews online about the things they buy. On a typical day, 21% of adults search for product information online.

This is an increase from 15% in 2007 and 9% in 2004. The 2010 data come from a telephone survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project conducted between August 9 and September 13, 2010. The survey was administered to a sample of 3,001 adults, age 18 and older, using a combination of landline and cellular telephones. Interviews were conducted in English or Spanish. The sample margin of error is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points for the general population and plus or minus 2.9 percentage points for internet users (n=2,065). Among internet users, 78% say that they at least occasionally conduct product research and 32% report that they have posted online product comments.

 

(Source: Pew Internet Research)

Full story

Pew Internet Research

The government is expanding its scholarship program for students in cybersecurity fields. About 108 universities participate in the 9-year-old Scholarship for Service program, which covers up to two years of tuition in exchange for two years of federal service. More schools, including community colleges, will be added in June, White House cybersecurity coordinator Howard Schmidt said Tuesday at the Interagency Resources Management Conference.

The expansion will be announced at the annual Colloquium for Information Systems Security Education — a conference that brings together academic, government and industry cybersecurity professionals — in June in Baltimore, Schmidt said.

 

(Source: Federal Times)

Full story

Federal Times

Patients whose medical identities are stolen face serious lingering effects. Fraudulent healthcare events can leave erroneous data in medical records. This erroneous information–like information about tests, diagnoses and procedures–can greatly affect future healthcare and insurance coverage and costs. Patients are often unaware of medical identity theft until a curious bill or a surprising line of questioning by a doctor exposes the issue. Then, the burden of proof is often with the patient and it can be difficult to get the patient’s legitimate medical records cleaned up. The consequences can also be life threatening and can lead to serious medical errors and fatalities.

1. Get a credit freeze and follow the steps for your particular state. This is an absolutely necessary tool to secure your credit. In most cases, it prevents new accounts from being opened in your name. This makes your Social Security number useless to a potential identity thief.

2. Invest in Intelius identity theft protection and prevention. Not all forms of identity theft can be prevented, but identity theft protection services can dramatically reduce your risk.

 

(Source: Infosec Island)

Full story

Infosec Island 

Google is investigating a growing number of reports that hackers are breaking into legitimate Gmail accounts and then using them to send spam messages. The problem started about a week ago but seems to have escalated over the past few days.

"The Gmail team takes security very seriously and is investigating the reports we've seen in our user forums over the past few days," Google said Tuesday in an e-mailed statement. "We encourage users who suspect their accounts have been compromised to immediately change their passwords and to follow the advice at the following page: http://www.google.com/help/security/." Gmail accounts are often compromised after phishing attempts or via malicious programs, which can seek out and log online credentials from a hacked computer.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

Text messaging rises sharply among teens and is now their most frequent form of communication with friends. 72% of those ages 12-17 now are texters and the average young text user exchanges 1,500 texts per month.

Cell phones are mixed blessing to American families, bringing safety and connection along with disruption and irritation. Daily text messaging among American teens has shot up in the past 18 months from 38% of teens texting friends daily in February of 2008, to 54% of teens texting daily in September 2009. In fact, text messaging has become the most frequent way that teens reach their friends, surpassing face-to-face meetings, email, instant messaging and voice calling as a daily communications tool. However, cell phone calling is still the preferred mode that teens use to connect with their parents.

 

(Source: Pew Research Center)

Full story

Pew Research Center

Two senators yesterday introduced a bill that seeks to build a multilateral framework to mitigate and respond to disrupting cyber attacks.

The bill, sponsored by Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., would create an ambassador-rank coordinator position at the State Department that would advise the secretary of State on international cyberspace and cybersecurity issues. The coordinator would promote development of a strategy for international cyber engagement, including considering the utility of negotiating a multilateral framework that would provide internationally acceptable principles to mitigate cyberwarfare.

 

(Source: Federal Times)

Full story

Federal Times

 

In a decision that could set new ground rules for Internet privacy in the workplace, New Jersey's Supreme Court has ruled an employer was wrong in retrieving e-mails between a former employee and her attorney, even though they were sent from a company computer.

"Courts are looking more closely at privacy claims in the digital worklplace," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington, D.C.-based public-interest research group. "Just because a person is using a company computer doesn't mean they leave all their rights to privacy at the door."

 

(Source: AP)

Full story

AP

Suing your parents isn't just for celebrities anymore--a 16-year-old Arkansas boy is suing his mother for hacking into his Facebook account and allegedly posting slanderous remarks. ATV-TV reports that Denise New of Arkadelphia is facing harassment charges from her 16-year-old. Her son, who lives with his grandmother, also requested a no-contact order. Prior to this issue, New and her son reportedly had a "great relationship," despite their living arrangements.

According to the boy, his mother hacked into his Facebook and email accounts, then changed both passwords. She also allegedly posted remarks that involved slander and information about his personal life. New admits to changing the passwords, but denies hacking--she claims he left his account logged in on her computer.

 

(Source: PC World)

Full story

PC World

One of the world's most notorious computer hackers was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Thursday after he pleaded guilty to helping run a global ring that stole tens of millions of payment card numbers. Albert Gonzalez, a 28-year-old college dropout from Miami, had confessed to helping lead a ring that stole more than 40 million payment card numbers by breaking into retailers including TJX Cos Inc, BJ's Wholesale Club Inc and Barnes & Noble.

It was the harshest sentence ever handed down for a computer crime in an American court, said Mark Rasch, former head of the computer crimes unit at the U.S. Department of Justice. Gonzalez and conspirators scattered across the globe caused some $200 million in damages to those businesses, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann.

 

(Source: Reuters)

Full story

Reuters

Four countries and two territories have won preliminary approval to have Internet addresses written entirely in their native scripts as early as this summer.

Rules are being developed to make sure that addresses in either script go to the same Web sites. Since their creation in the 1980s, Internet domain names such as those that end in ".com" have been limited to 37 characters: the 10 numerals, the hyphen and the 26 letters in the Latin alphabet used in English. Technical tricks have been used to allow portions of the Internet address to use other scripts, but until now, the suffix had to use those 37 characters.

 

(Source: AP)

Full story

AP

Hollywood and Bollywood linked arms Thursday to fight piracy, with the announcement of a coalition among the Motion Picture Association of America and seven Indian companies to tackle counterfeiting in one of the world's largest film markets.

The alliance comes as Hollywood tries to tap global markets more aggressively and as Indian movie studios grow in size and stature — narrowing the gap between Indian and U.S. filmmakers, who have not always seen eye-to-eye on intellectual property issues. A year in the making, the coalition to fight film piracy in India will work with movie theaters to crack down on camcorder piracy — the source of 90 percent of all pirated DVDs — with police to tighten enforcement, with Internet service providers to fight Internet piracy and with politicians to create more effective laws.

 

(Source: AP)

Full story

AP

More than three-quarters of people across the world believe access to the Internet is a fundamental right, a poll carried out for the BBC indicated Monday. The poll, which questioned more than 27,000 adults across 26 countries, suggested strong support globally for access to the web. The findings come as efforts are stepped up across the world to increase net access, with the United Nations leading a push for more people to be given the opportunity to get online. Countries including Finland and Estonia have already ruled it is a human right, said the BBC.

"The right to communicate cannot be ignored," Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union, told the broadcaster. "The Internet is the most powerful potential source of enlightenment ever created."

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

Hackers breaking into businesses and government agencies with targeted attacks have not only stolen intellectual property, in some cases they have corrupted data too, the head of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation said Thursday. The United States has been under assault from these targeted spear-phishing attacks for years, but they received mainstream attention in January, when Google admitted that it had been hit and threatened to pull its business out of China -- the presumed source of the attack -- as a result.

Researchers investigating the Google attack -- thought to have affected at least 100 companies including Intel, Adobe and Symantec -- say that prime targets of the hackers were the source code management systems used by software developers to build code.

 

(Source: PC World)

Full story

PC World

Authorities have smashed one of the world's biggest networks of virus-infected computers, a data vacuum that stole credit cards and online banking credentials from as many as 12.7 million poisoned PCs. The "botnet" of infected computers included PCs inside more than half of the Fortune 1,000 companies and more than 40 major banks, according to investigators.

Spanish investigators, working with private computer-security firms, have arrested the three alleged ringleaders of the so-called Mariposa botnet, which appeared in December 2008 and grew into one of the biggest weapons of cybercrime. More arrests are expected soon in other countries.

 

(Source: The New Zealand Herald)

Full story

The New Zealand Herald

Four California men were charged on Monday with using sophisticated computer programs to fraudulently obtain more than a million tickets to concerts and sporting events and reselling them for a profit estimated at $29 million.

The company was able to snap up the best seats as soon as they were made available online because the programs were able to complete transactions more quickly than real humans vying for tickets manually. For example, Fishman said, Wiseguy bought nearly half the 440 available floor tickets for a Bruce Springsteen concert at Giants Stadium in 2008. In most cases, individual buyers are restricted to a maximum of four tickets.

 

(Source: AP)

Full story

AP

Intel was the victim of a cyber attack similar to the one experienced by Google, the company revealed Monday. "We regularly face attempts by others to gain unauthorized access through the Internet to our information technology systems," Intel said in regulatory filings posted by The New York Times. "One recent and sophisticated incident occurred in January 2010 around the same time as the recently publicized security incident reported by Google."

Attacks have included people who masqueraded as authorized users or those who used "surreptitious introduction of software," Intel said. "These attempts, which might be the result of industrial or other espionage, or actions by hackers seeking to harm the company, its products, or end users, are sometimes successful."

 

(Source: PC Magazine)

Full story

PC Magazine

A former security researcher turned criminal hacker has been sentenced to 13 years in federal prison for hacking into financial institutions and stealing credit card account numbers.

Max Ray Butler, who used the hacker pseudonym Iceman, was sentenced Friday morning in U.S. District Court in Pittsburgh on charges of wire fraud and identity theft. In addition to his 13-year sentence, Butler will face five years of supervised release and must pay US$27.5 million in restitution to his victims, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Luke Dembosky, who prosecuted the case for the federal government. Dembosky believes the 13 year sentence is the longest-ever handed down for hacking charges.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

A new type of computer virus is known to have breached almost 75,000 computers in 2,500 organizations around the world, including user accounts of popular social network websites, according Internet security firm NetWitness. The latest virus -- known as "Kneber botnet" -- gathers login credentials to online financial systems, social networking sites and email systems from infested computers and reports the information back to hackers, NetWitness said in a statement.

A botnet is an army of infected computers that hackers can control from a central machine." The company said the attack was first discovered in January during a routine deployment of NetWitness software.

 

(Source: Reuters)

Full story

Reuters

A common Web programming error could give hackers a way to take over Google Buzz accounts, a security expert said Tuesday. The flaw is a "medium-sized problem" with the Buzz for Mobile Web site, said Robert Hansen, CEO of SecTheory, who first reported the issue. This type of Web programming error, called a cross-site scripting flaw, lets the attacker put his own scripting code into Web pages that belong to trusted Web sites such as Google.com. It is a fairly common flaw but one that can have major consequences when exploited on widely used Web sites.

The attacker "can force you to say things you don't want to say, to follow people," he said. "Whatever Google Buzz allows you to do, it allows him to do to you."

 

(Source: PC World)

Full story

PC World

Former top US intelligence officials will become cyberwarriors on Tuesday in a simulation of how the US government would respond to a massive cyberattack on the United States. "The scenario itself is secret," said Eileen McMenamin, vice president of communications for the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), which is hosting the event dubbed "Cyber ShockWave." "The participants don't even know what it is," McMenamin told AFP. "None of them know what's going to transpire."

Former president George W. Bush's Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff will play the role of National Security Advisor to the president while former Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte will be Secretary of State.

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

Deep inside millions of computers is a digital Fort Knox, a special chip with the locks to highly guarded secrets, including classified government reports and confidential business plans. Now a former U.S. Army computer-security specialist has devised a way to break those locks.

The attack can force heavily secured computers to spill documents that likely were presumed to be safe. This discovery shows one way that spies and other richly financed attackers can acquire military and trade secrets, and comes as worries about state-sponsored computer espionage intensify, underscored by recent hacking attacks on Google Inc.

 

(Source: AP)

Full story

AP

If Your Password Is 123456, Just Make It HackMe. Back at the dawn of the Web, the most popular account password was “12345.” Today, it’s one digit longer but hardly safer: “123456.”

Despite all the reports of Internet security breaches over the years, including the recent attacks on Google’s e-mail service, many people have reacted to the break-ins with a shrug. According to a new analysis, one out of five Web users still decides to leave the digital equivalent of a key under the doormat: they choose a simple, easily guessed password like “abc123,” “iloveyou” or even “password” to protect their data.

 

(Source: The New York Times)

Full story

The New York Times

Hundreds of tech volunteers spurred to action by Haiti's killer quake are adding a new dimension to disaster relief, developing new tools and services for first responders and the public in an unprecedented effort. "It really is amazing the change in the way crisis response can be done now," said Noel Dickover, a Washington, D.C.-based organizer of the CrisisCamp tech volunteer movement, which is central to the Haiti effort. "Developers, crisis mappers and even Internet-savvy folks can actually make a difference."

Another volunteer project forged in the quake's aftermath is a cell phone text-messaging system that has helped the U.N., Red Cross and other relief groups dispatch rescuers, food and water.

 

(Source: AP)

Full story

AP

The World Economic Forum today released its study on Scaling Opportunity: Information and Communications Technology for Social Inclusion, an analysis of how ICT is evolving to address the social and economic needs of the poor. The study notes that, as 4 billion people have access to the global communications infrastructure, the opportunity to create innovative and inclusively tailored solutions for connecting the unconnected is extraordinary.

Along with highlighting the rapid adoption rate of mobile phone usage within emerging economies, the report focuses on the question: “What’s next?”

 

(Source: eGov Monitor)

Full story

eGov Monitor

Hackers are attacking consumers with an exploit of Internet Explorer (IE) that was allegedly used last month by the Chinese to break into Google's corporate network, a security company said Monday.

That news came on the heels of warnings by the information security agencies of the French and German governments, which recommended that IE users switch to an alternate browser, such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari or Opera, until Microsoft fixes the flaw. In a Monday alert Websense said it identified "limited public use" of the unpatched IE vulnerability in drive-by attacks against users who strayed onto malicious Web sites.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

Violent video games have "a much bigger negative influence on kids" than pornography, a leading porn star has claimed. He said parents should be more worried about the harmful effects of such games. Mr Jeremy's comments were made at a session called the Great Porn Debate during the Consumer Electronics Show, CES, in Las Vegas. His comments angered gamers, who accused him of "ignorance".

Mr Jeremy also urged parents to play their part in preventing children from accessing adult websites. He said the industry already does all it can to protect youngsters. "Parents can block this stuff and need to stop blaming porn for a bad case of parenting," Mr Jeremy told BBC News.

 

(Source: BBC)

Full story

BBC

A wireless industry group said mobile phone conversations are safe from eavesdropping, even after a German security expert released the code for unscrambling calls made using most of the world's cell phones. Concerns spread last week that cell phone calls could easily be intercepted after encryption expert Karsten Nohl unveiled his research at Europe's largest hacking conference, in Berlin.

The London-based GSM Association said on Thursday that it has spent the past few years figuring out ways to thwart hackers who might try to tap into wireless calls using Nohl's research, which it first learned of in 2007.

 

(Source: Reuters)

Full story

Reuters

People who post intimate details about their lives on the internet undermine everybody else's right to privacy, claims an academic. Dr Kieron O'Hara has called for people to be more aware of the impact on society of what they publish online. "If you look at privacy in law, one important concept is a reasonable expectation of privacy," he said. "As more private lives are exported online, reasonable expectations are diminishing."

The rise of social networking has blurred the boundaries of what can be considered private, he believes - making it less of a defence by law. We live in an era that he terms "intimacy 2.0" - where people routinely share extremely personal information online.

 

(Source: BBC)

Full story

BBC

Got an e-mail list of customers or readers and want to know more about each such as their full name, friends, gender, age, interests, location, job and education level? Facebook has just the free feature you're looking for, thanks to its recent privacy changes. The hack, first publicized by blogger Max Klein, repurposes a Facebook feature that lets people find their friends on Facebook by scanning through e-mail addresses in their contact list.

Using a simple scraping tool, a marketer could then turn a list of e-mail addresses into a rich, full-fledged set of marketing profiles, with names, pictures, ages, locations, interests, photos, wall posts, affiliations and names of your friends, depending on how users have their profiles set.

 

(Source: CNN)

Full story

CNN

Internet users are being warned to watch out for a computer virus targeting popular social networking sites in the run up to Christmas.

Security experts say the new virus is "particularly nasty" and compels its victims to participate manually in creating a new Facebook account to help spread the worm. "The more people who use an application such as Facebook, or any other means of social networking, the more likely they are to be targeted by bad guys to send out malicious threats such as Koobface." The internet security company recommends that users do not reply to or follow links included in unsolicited Facebook messages and users should always carefully check that the URL they are entering is really that of the site they want to access.

 

(Source: FOX News)

Full story

FOX News

Thirty percent of 17-year-olds with cell phones have received sexting photos or videos, while eight percent have sent them, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center. What's more, four percent of 12- to 17-year-olds admit they have texted sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images of themselves to someone else. Another 15 percent said they have received such images.

Meanwhile, laws and law-enforcement practices have emerged around sexting. The Pew report notes that some law-enforcement officers and district attorneys have begun prosecuting teens who create and share such images under laws generally reserved for producers and distributors of child pornography.

 

(Source: News Factor)

Full story

News Factor

They're the scourge of the Internet right now and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation says they've also raked in more than $150 million for scammers. Security experts call them rogue antivirus programs.

The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center issued a warning over this fake antivirus software Friday, saying that Web surfers should be wary of sudden pop-up windows that report security problems on their computers. This software can appear almost anywhere on the Web. Typically, the scam starts with an aggressive pop-up advertisement that looks like some sort of virus scan. Often it's nearly impossible to get rid of the pop-up windows.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

ISO will develop a technical report (TR) to help emerging and developing countries implement a solid and internationally harmonized health informatics system. The report will present information in an accessible way to guide and facilitate the adoption of relevant International Standards by countries with limited resources and infrastructure.

International Standards can help by providing globally harmonized specifications for establishing the architectural framework used to design eHealth systems, plan implementation, make build-or-buy decisions, decide on acquisitions and undertake related activities.

 

(Source: ISO)

Full story

ISO 

What do phishing, instant messaging malware, DDoS attacks and 419 scams have in common? According to Cisco Systems, they're all has-been cybercrimes that were supplanted by slicker, more menacing forms of cybercrime over the past year.

In its 2009 Annual Security Report, due to be released Tuesday, Cisco says that the smart cyber-criminals are moving on. "Social media and the data-theft Trojans are the things that are really in their ascent," said Patrick Peterson, a Cisco researcher. "You can see them replacing a lot of the old-school things."

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

The U.S. government and private businesses need to overhaul the way they look at cybersecurity, with the government offering businesses new incentives to fix security problems, the Internet Security Alliance said.

The alliance, in a report released Thursday, also called for permanent international cybersecurity collaboration centers, new security standards for VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) communications and programs to educate corporate leaders about the benefits of enhanced cybersecurity efforts. Lots of groups have called for better information security education for students, but education for enterprise leaders is often overlooked, said Joe Buonomo, president and CEO of Direct Computer Resources, a data security products vendor.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

The 13-year-old Florida girl sent a topless photo of herself to a boy in hope of gaining his attention. Instead, she got the attention of her school, as well as the high school nearby. The incessant bullying by classmates that followed when the photo spread put an emotional weight upon Hope that she ultimately could not bear.

Her death is only the second known case of a suicide linked to bullying after “sexting” — the practice of transmitting sexual messages or images electronically. In March, 18-year-old Jesse Logan killed herself in the face of a barrage of taunts when an ex-boyfriend forwarded explicit photos of her following their split. “As far as training them on the Internet and what to look at and what not to look at, yeah, we talked about it,”

 

(Source: MSNBC)

Full story

MSNBC

If your iPhone has been jailbroken, change your passwords now, advised Paul Ducklin, Sophos Australia's chief of technology. Ducklin said the writers of this virus included a program call "Duh", which added malicious capabilities not present in last month's ikee release.

The new password installed by this virus was "ohshit", which can be used to remove the threat of further remote attacks on an infected device. Ducklin said to clean up the device by searching the file "directory/private/var/mobile/home", type in "passwd" to initiate the command, and change the password. "Otherwise the buggers can get back in anytime they want," said Ducklin.

 

(Source: ZDNet Australia)

Full story

ZDNet Australia

Diners who frequent a popular Downtown restaurant should review their charge-card statements because hackers broke into its computer system to loot debit- and credit-card numbers, police said today.

Between 30 and 50 people have reported fraudulent charges on their accounts, and Columbus detectives said that anyone who used a charge card at Tip Top Kitchen and Cocktails in July or August is at risk. The hackers have been traced to an overseas Internet address, and no Tip Top employees are involved, police said. The hackers found a weak point in the restaurant's computer defenses, wormed their way in, and installed "malware" that stripped the numbers.

 

(Source: The Columbus Dispatch)

Full story

The Columbus Dispatch

While the Senate bogs down in negotiations over drafting major cybersecurity reform legislation, a House panel Wednesday passed a nuts-and-bolts IT security bill that would require the president to assess the government's cybersecurity workforce, including an agency-by-agency skills assessment, and provide scholarship to students who agree to work as cybersecurity specialists for the government after graduation.

"There are some very technically, sophisticated ways in enhancing cybersecurity, but there are some simple ways, also. Some aspects of computer security are rocket science and others are fairly, simple precautionary steps which most people can take."

 

(Source: Gov Info Security)

Full story

Gov Info Security

That television set you discourage your children from watching may not be the greatest threat to their wellbeing. Instead, the mobile phone is the gateway in introducing children to the world of cyberspace, posing a great risk to their safety, a lobby group said Tuesday.

According to The Cradle, the unmonitored use of technology is increasingly exposing youngsters to the risk of harm and violence. "Only 24 per cent of children in the study reported to their parents or an authority of online or cell phone harassment,” Cradle programme manager Brian Weke told journalists. The study also revealed that 77 out of the 96, who had the incidences reported to them, took no action and ignored the seriousness of the matter.

 

(Source: Daily Nation)

Full story

Daily Nation

Four men, including the self-proclaimed "Godfather of Spam," were sentenced to prison on Monday for their roles in an email stock fraud scheme, the Justice Department said. FBI special agent said Ralsky, the self-proclaimed "Godfather of Spam," flooded email boxes with unwanted spam email and attempted to use a botnet to hijack computers to assist them in the scheme. A botnet is a network of computers infected by malicious software.

"Today's sentencing sends a powerful message to spammers whose goal is to manipulate financial transactions and the stock market through illegal email advertisements," said assistant attorney general Lanny Breuer.

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

 

A Canadian woman on long-term sick leave for depression says she lost her benefits because her insurance agent found photos of her on Facebook in which she appeared to be having fun.

Nathalie Blanchard has been on leave from her job at IBM in Bromont, Quebec, for the last year. The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported Saturday she was diagnosed with major depression and was receiving monthly sick-leave benefits from insurance giant Manulife. But the payments dried up this fall and when Blanchard called Manulife, she says she was told she was available to work because of Facebook.

 

(Source: AP)

Full story

AP

A series of skimming crimes that hit the Nashville, TN area recently is but one of many ATM fraud schemes preying upon financial institutions and their customers.

Nashville police reported last week that they were investigating an ATM card skimming scheme where at least 600 individuals were potential victims. Investigators say five Bank of America ATMs were hit, as well as an unknown number of US Bank machines. A total of 60 people had fraudulent withdrawals from their accounts for anywhere between $100 to $5,000 dollars. Investigators suspect that the skimming schemers have now moved on to other cities. "No one vendor or ATM type is more susceptible over another," Ipson says, "so everyone needs to be aware of this threat."

 

(Source: Bank Info Security)

Full story

Bank Info Security

The world's biggest social networking site has brushed off criticism by a senior UK police officer responsible for preventing online bullying that it is failing to combat abuse.

Jim Gamble, head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (Ceop) Center, said Facebook and MySpace, which between them have more than 500 million users, could work harder to stamp out bullying. The initiative came as UK charity Beatbullying highlighted Bebo, owned by AOL, and Microsoft's instant messaging service as hotspots for bullying. In a poll of 2,094 young people across England conducted by the charity, 30 percent of 11 to 16-year-olds who had been "cyberbullied" had been targeted on Bebo.

 

(Source: CNN)

Full story

CNN

Cyber war has moved from fiction to fact, says a report. Compiled by security firm McAfee, it bases its conclusion on analysis of recent net-based attacks. Analysis of the motives of the actors behind many attacks carried out via the internet showed that many were mounted with a explicitly political aim.

It said that many nations were now arming to defend themselves in a cyber war and readying forces to conduct their own attacks. "There are at least five countries known to be arming themselves for this kind of conflict," said Greg Day, primary analyst for security at McAfee Europe. The UK, Germany, France, China and North Korea are known to be developing their own capabilities.

 

(Source: BBC)

Full story

BBC

The first applications were accepted on Monday for internationalised domain names (IDNs), in one of the most significant steps to making the Internet more accessible around the globe.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has opened the application process, ending the exclusive use of Latin characters for website addresses. On the first day, "we have already received six applications from around the world for three different scripts," ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom told an Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Egypt's Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

Criminal gangs are making millions of dollars out of the H1N1 flu pandemic by selling fake flu drugs over the internet, a web security firm said on Monday.

Sophos, a British security software firm said it had intercepted hundreds of millions of fake pharmaceutical spam adverts and websites this year, many of them trying to sell counterfeit antiviral drugs like Tamiflu to worried customers. Tamiflu, an antiviral marketed by Switzerland's Roche Holding and known generically as oseltamivir, is the frontline drug recommended by the World Health Organization to treat and slow the progression of flu symptoms. GlaxoSmithKline makes another antiviral for flu, known as Relenza.

 

(Source: Reuters)

Full story

Reuters 

A new spam campaign is targeting a financial transfer system that handles trillions of dollars in transactions annually and has proved to be a fertile target of late for online fraudsters.

The spam messages pretend to come from the National Automated Clearing House Association (NACHA), a U.S. nonprofit association that oversees the Automated Clearing House system (ACH). ACH is a widely used but aging system used by financial institutions for exchanging details of direct deposits, checks and cash transfers made by businesses and individuals. In 2002, ACH was used for nearly 9 billion transactions worth more than $24.4 trillion.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

For the last few days, some jailbroken iPhone users have found their home screen background a little different than they remembered. A hacker, going by the name "ikee," created a worm that changes the home screen background on jailbroken iPhones whose owners failed to change the default password after installing SSH.

Simply jailbreaking your iPhone will not make you vulnerable to this sort of hack. The iPhone OS, in general, is also immune to this hack. On jailbroken iPhones, SSH is installable with a package from Cydia that allows you to connect to your phone and make changes to the filesystem.

 

(Source: TUAW News)

Full story

TUAW News

Australian internet provider BigPond has become the latest internet company to be targeted by hackers on Twitter, after one of its accounts was hijacked as part of a phishing scam.

Affected users received a private message from BigPondTeam saying "Hey, look at this," and directing them to follow a link that asked them to enter their Twitter password. The attack was part of an attempt to steal their credentials and potentially gain access to other services they use - such as their bank accounts or email services.

 

(Source: Guardian)

Full story

Guardian

THE next world war could take place in cyberspace, the UN telecommunications agency chief has warned. "The next world war could happen in cyberspace and that would be a catastrophe. We have to make sure that all countries understand that in that war, there is no such thing as a superpower,'' Hamadoun Toure said.

"Loss of vital networks would quickly cripple any nation, and none is immune to cyberattack,'' added the secretary-general of the International Telecommunications Union during the ITU's Telecom World 2009 fair in Geneva. As the internet becomes more linked with daily lives, cyberattacks and crimes have also increased in frequency, experts said.

 

(Source: News.com)

Full story

News.com

Pedophiles can exploit virus-infected PCs to remotely store and view their stash without fear they'll get caught. Pranksters or someone trying to frame you can tap viruses to make it appear that you surf illegal Web sites. Whatever the motivation, you get child porn on your computer — and might not realize it until police knock at your door.

An Associated Press investigation found cases in which innocent people have been branded as pedophiles after their co-workers or loved ones stumbled upon child porn placed on a PC through a virus. It can cost victims hundreds of thousands of dollars to prove their innocence.

 

(Source: AP)

Full story

AP

An expert on cable modem hacking has been arrested by federal authorities on computer intrusion charges. According to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Ryan Harris, 26, ran a San Diego company called TCNISO that sold customizable cable modems and software that could be used to get free Internet service or a speed boost for paying subscribers.

Hackers have known for years that certain models of cable modem, such as the Motorola Surfboard 5100, can be hacked to run faster on a network, a process known as uncapping.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

If your cash card gets eaten by the automated-teller machine, it may not end up in the hands of a bank employee. European financial institutions are seeing a sharp rise in card "trapping," where criminals use various tricks in order to capture and retrieve a person's ATM card for fraudulent use.

For the first half of this year, financial institutions reported 1,045 trapping incidents, according to a new report from the European ATM Security Team (EAST), a nonprofit group composed of financial institutions and law enforcement. The figure, which covers 20 countries within the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA), represents a 640 percent increase over the first half of 2008.

 

(Source: CIO)

Full story

CIO

Twitter warned users Tuesday of a new phishing scam on the social networking site. It's the latest in a series of scams that have plagued the site over the past year, designed to trick victims into giving up their user names and passwords.

"We've seen a few phishing attempts today, if you've received a strange DM and it takes you to a Twitter login page, don't do it!," Twitter wrote on its Spam message page. The message reads, "hi. this you on here?" and includes a link to a fake Web site designed to look like a Twitter log-in page. After entering a user name and password, victims enter an empty blogspot page belonging to someone named NetMeg99.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

Facebook outlined changes to its privacy policy on Thursday and asked for feedback from the social network's more than 300 million users. Members will have until November 5 to send in their comments about the proposed changes.

"This is the next step in our ongoing effort to run Facebook in an open and transparent way. After the comment period is over, we'll review your feedback and update you on our next steps." Some of the changes to Facebook's privacy policy are the result of pressure from Canada, whose privacy czar conducted an investigation into its handling of personal information.

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

I am advised to "avoid giving my credit card online" and to be "careful when banking online" and to use random, complex passwords that I never repeat and never write down. So, as long as I refrain from commerce, stay indoors and have a superhuman memory, I should be fine!

I worry about identity theft and take measures, throughout the year, to defend my identity. So here's some identify defense advice that's actually practical: * Don't sign credit cards. I sign mine "See ID". Why give a card thief my signature too?

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

The 17-year-old’s body was dumped in a ditch after she sneaked out of her home on Sunday night to meet a boy she thought was 16, but who turned out to be 32. Her mother, Andrea Hall urged, “Tell your kids to be careful on the internet. Don't trust anybody and don't put your children on Facebook or other sites if they are under age. All we ask now is that people help the police in any way they can. We don't want any other child to be a victim.”

A 32-year-old man, of no fixed abode was due to appear at Newton Aycliffe Magistrates Court on Wednesday, charged with manslaughter and kidnap. The convicted sex offender was also charged with failing to notify a new address as required for sex offenders under the Sexual Offences Act 2003.

 

(Source: Telegraph)

Full story

Telegraph

Nearly a decade after it introduced a program to internationalize domain names, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is expected to take another step on Friday. ICANN, during its annual meeting in Seoul, Korea, will vote on the internationalized domain names (IDN) initiative, better known as the Fast Track.

"In Seoul, we plan to move forward to the next step in the internationalization of the Internet, which means that eventually people from every corner of the globe will be able to navigate much of the online world using their native language scripts," said Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's CEO.

 

(Source: NewsFactor)

Full story

NewsFactor 

Developing countries risk missing out on the benefits of information technology because of their lack of broadband infrastructure, a U.N. agency said.

Lack of broadband Internet access deprives countries of the possibility of building up offshoring industries, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) said in a report late on Thursday. It also prevents people from tapping into all the advantages of mobile phones, whose use is exploding in poor countries. "What is known as the broadband gap for example is becoming a serious handicap for companies in many poor countries," he told a briefing to launch UNCTAD's Information Economy Report.

 

(Source: Reuters)

Full story

Reuters 

The Internet is set for its biggest technical change in decades when a new multilingual address system is approved this week, a global regulatory body said Monday.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said it would declare an end to the exclusive use of Latin characters for website addresses on Friday -- the final day of its six-day conference in Seoul. When the change comes into force, it will be possible to use characters from other languages -- such as Chinese, Arabic, Korean and Japanese -- for a full Internet address, instead of for just part of an address as now.

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

Nigeria's anti-corruption police is working with Microsoft to halt thousands of fraudulent emails in a crackdown on internet crime in Africa's most populous country, an agency spokesman said.

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) said on Thursday its new project "Eagle Claw," expected to become fully operational within six months, is aimed at improving Nigeria's tarnished image as one of the world's top countries for internet crime. The agency said it has already shut down 800 scam websites and arrested 18 people.

 

(Source: Reuters)

Full story

Reuters 

Networks of hacked computers are being used more than ever to click on advertisements, a scam known as click fraud that cheats search engines, publishers and ad networks out of revenue.

For the third quarter of the year, 42.6% of fraudulent clicks came from botnet-infected computers, according to Click Forensics, a company that produces tools to detect and filter out fraudulent clicks. The figure is the highest in four years, when Click Forensics began producing reports. For the same quarter a year ago, botnets accounted for 27.5% of bad clicks. Botnets are a powerful tool for hackers.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

China is building its cyberwarfare capabilities and appears to be using the growing technical abilities to collect U.S. intelligence through a sophisticated and long-term computer attack campaign, according to an independent report.

Released Thursday by a congressional advisory panel, the study found cases suggesting that China's elite hacker community has ties to the Beijing government, although there is little hard evidence. The Pentagon report described computer attacks believed to have originated in China, but concluded that "it remains unclear if these intrusions were conducted by, or with the endorsement of, the PLA or other elements of the PRC (People's Republic of China) government."

 

(Source: AP)

Full story

AP

It is being billed as the largest-ever social change event on the Web and one which its organizers believe will unite the digital world in a wider conversation about climate change.

"I would say that 99 percent of our bloggers have never written about climate change before. I think there is a lot of power in people who usually don't write about this having conversations about a major issue like climate change." The scale of involvement in the day has been impressive. So far, over 8,000 blogs have registered in 144 countries and organizers predict that there will be around 15 million readers.

 

(Source: CNN)

Full story

CNN

Microsoft admitted Hotmail users had been tricked into revealing their passwords, 10,000 of which had been published online.

The spam is being sent from users' accounts to contacts in their address books - so recipients will think it came from one of their friends. While the new spam is not malicious in itself, it does point the contact in the direction of something that is — a "shopping" website. The trick is, the shopping site is not a real one. The scam persuades victims to order goods online by credit card, leaving them vulnerable to identity theft and fraud.

 

(Source: Fox News)

Full story

Fox News

Hotmail and several other Web e-mail providers were recently hit by phishing attacks that gleaned usernames and passwords.It's terribly insecure, but the string of digits 1234567 is a popular password on Hotmail, according to security researcher Bogdan Calin, who analyzed 9,843 stolen Windows Live Hotmail passwords that were posted on a Web site.

In a blog post, Calin said the following were the most common passwords in the Hotmail collection: 123456, 123456789, alejandra, 111111, alberto, tequiero, alejandro and 12345678.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

Surfing the Internet just might be a way to preserve your mental skills as you age. Researchers found that older adults who started browsing the Web experienced improved brain function after only a few days.

"You can teach an old brain new technology tricks," said Dr. Gary Small, a psychiatry professor. With people who had little Internet experience, "we found that after just a week of practice, there was a much greater extent of activity particularly in the areas of the brain that make decisions, the thinking brain -- which makes sense because, when you're searching online, you're making a lot of decisions," he said. "It's interactive."

 

(Source: Health Day)

Full story

Health Day

Tens of millions of U.S. computers are loaded with scam security software that their owners may have paid for but which only makes the machines more vulnerable, according to a new Symantec report on cybercrime.

Cyberthieves are increasingly planting fake security alerts that pop up when computer users access a legitimate website. The "alert" warns them of a virus and offers security software, sometimes for free and sometimes for a fee. "Lots of times, in fact they're a conduit for attackers to take over your machine. They'll take your credit card information, any personal information you've entered there and they've got your machine,"

 

(Source: Reuters)

Full story

Reuters 

It’s the F word question that all parents now dread. “Can I go on Facebook?” your eleven year-old bullies you over dinner, declaring that absolutely everybody else in her class is not only on Facebook, but also on Twitter as well as Bebo and Orkut and other peculiarly named social networks.

So how should parents in today’s social media age deal with the F word question? Is social networking bad for children’s brains? Should we allow our kids to freely expose their identities on the Internet?

 

(Source: Telegraph)

Full story

Telegraph

Cyber-crime just doesn't pay like it used to. Security researchers say the cost of criminal services such as distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks has dropped in recent months. The reason? Market economics.

Criminals have gotten better at hacking into unsuspecting computers and linking them together into so-called botnet networks, which can then be centrally controlled. Botnets are used to send spam, steal passwords, and sometimes to launch DDoS attacks, which flood victims' servers with unwanted information.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

Twitter users should refrain from changing their log-in data until further notice or else risk getting locked out of their accounts. Twitter is investigating instances of users who have lost access to their accounts after modifying their usernames, passwords or e-mail addresses, the microblogging company said on Tuesday.

Until the problem is resolved, Twitter users shouldn't modify their log-in data, according to an official posting on Twitter's Status Web site. "This seems to affect new users as well as long term users," the note reads.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

Studies on whether mobile phones can cause cancer, especially brain tumors, vary widely in quality and there may be some bias in those showing the least risk, researchers reported on Tuesday. So far it is difficult to demonstrate any link, although the best studies do suggest some association between mobile phone use and cancer, the team led by Dr. Seung-Kwon Myung of South Korea's National Cancer Center found.

Myung and colleagues at Ewha Womans University and Seoul National University Hospital in Seoul and the University of California, Berkeley, examined 23 published studies of more than 37,000 people in what is called a meta-analysis.

 

(Source: Reuters)

Full story

Reuters 

About a third of UK employees throw sensitive documents in the bin instead of shredding them, research suggests. The study also found almost three-quarters of workers felt their organisations could do more to protect their customers' sensitive information.

The data was compiled for National Identity Fraud Prevention Week. Identity fraud costs the UK more than £1.2bn annually. The UK's Fraud Prevention Service says 60,000 people have fallen victim so far this year.

 

(Source: BBC)

Full story

BBC 

Facebook has seen an impressive bump in traffic versus this time last year. For September 2009, the site claimed 58.6 percent of U.S. social networking tracking, a jump of 194-percent over the same period last year. Twitter's increase, meanwhile, was downright absurd, jumping 1,170 percent over the past year.

In September 2008, Facebook recorded a 19.94 share, which increased to 58.59 percent for Sept. 2009. MySpace, by contrast, dominated the social-networking sites last September, with a 66.8 percent share. Since then, however, MySpace's market share has plunged to 30.3 percent, still leaving it second in U.S. traffic.

 

(Source: PC Magazine)

Full story

PC Magazine

For the fourth time this year, Adobe has admitted that hackers used malicious PDF documents to break into Windows PCs.

The bug in the popular Reader PDF viewer and the Acrobat PDF maker is being exploited in "limited targeted attacks," Adobe said yesterday. That phrasing generally means hackers are sending the rigged PDF documents to a short list of users, oftentimes company executives or others whose PCs contain a treasure trove of confidential information.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

Security researchers are warning that Web-based applications are increasing the risk of identity theft or losing personal data more than ever before.

The best defense against data theft, malware and viruses in the cloud is self defense, researchers at the Hack In The Box (HITB) security conference said. But getting people to change how they use the Internet, such as what personal data they make public, won't be easy.

 

(Source: PCWorld)

Full story

PCWorld 

Meet "network man." He has basic desires of his own, but has many arbitrary preferences, such as in music or clothes, that have been influenced by the people he knows. Network man's likes and dislikes, in turn, affect the behavior of his friends, and their friends, and their friends.

People have profound influences on each other's behavior within three degrees of separation, the authors find. That means that your friends, your friends' friends, and your friends' friends' friends may all affect your eating habits, voting preferences, happiness, and more. At the fourth degree, however, the influence substantially weakens.

 

(Source: CNN)

Full story

CNN

The head of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has stopped banking online after nearly falling for a phishing attempt. FBI Director Robert Mueller said he recently came "just a few clicks away from falling into a classic Internet phishing scam" after receiving an e-mail that appeared to be from his bank.

In phishing scams, criminals send spam e-mails to their victims, hoping to trick them into entering sensitive information such as usernames and passwords at fake Web sites.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

IPhone lovers and other smartphone users should take heed: A security researcher showed ways to spy on a BlackBerry user during a presentation Wednesday, including listening to phone conversations, stealing contact lists, reading text messages, taking and viewing photos and figuring out the handset's location via GPS.

And ironically, Sheran Gunasekera, head of research and development at ZenConsult, said the BlackBerry is one of the most secure smartphones available, in some ways better than the iPhone.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

Investigators in the United States and Egypt have smashed a computer "phishing" identity theft scam described as the biggest cyber-crime investigation in US history, officials said Wednesday.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said 33 people were arrested across the United States early Wednesday while authorities in Egypt charged 47 more people linked to the scam. A total of 53 suspects were named in connection with the scam in a federal grand jury indictment, the FBI said.

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

Privacy and security are foundational to health care reform. Patients will trust electronic health care records only if they believe their confidentiality is protected via good security.

As vice chairman of the federal Healthcare Information Technology Standards Committee, I have been on the front lines in the debate over the standards and implementation guidance needed to support the exchange of health care information. Over the past few months, I've learned a great deal from the committee's privacy and security workgroup.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

The social networking site said that its security teams had noticed an increase in scams where people's login information is collected through phishing sites, and then their accounts are accessed without permission to ask friends for money.

"While the total number of people who have been impacted is small, we take any threat to security seriously and are redoubling our efforts to combat the scam," The attacks, known as 419 scams, involve a fraudster accessing Facebook accounts and posing as the account owner.

 

(Source: Telegraph)

Full story

Telegraph

Microsoft blocked access to thousands of Hotmail accounts in response to hackers plundering password information and posting it online.

Cyber-crooks evidently used "phishing" tactics to dupe users of Microsoft's free Web-based email service into revealing account and access information, according to the US technology giant. Phishing is an Internet bane and involves using what hackers refer to as "social engineering" to trick people into revealing information online or downloading malicious software onto computers.

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

In a somewhat unusual data breach, hackers recently stole the login credentials of an unknown number of customers of payroll processing company PayChoice Inc., and then attempted to use the data to steal additional information directly from the customers themselves.

Hackers broke into the site and managed to access the real legal name, username and the partially masked passwords used by customers to log into the site. They then used the information to send very realistic looking phishing e-mails to PayChoice's customers directing them to download a Web browser plug-in to be able to continue using the onlineemployer.com service.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

US Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Thursday that her department has received the green light to hire up to 1,000 cybersecurity experts over the next three years.

Kicking off "National Cybersecurity Awareness Month," she said the new recruits would "help fulfill the department's broad mission to protect the nation's cyber infrastructure, systems and networks." "Effective cybersecurity requires all partners -- individuals, communities, government entities and the private sector -- to work together to protect our networks and strengthen our cyber resiliency," Napolitano said.

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

"We were at a restaurant for my mom's birthday. I looked over and there are my daughter and my oldest son texting, holding their phones under the table," said the mom of four in Lewiston, Idaho. "I just came unglued. I was like, `Are you kidding? You're at your grandma's birthday party. Put those phones away now!'"

We all know teens love their gadgets — more for texting than talking. But the devices are posing some new challenges for parents. How can they teach their tech-savvy kids some electronic etiquette? So far, parents are learning on the fly, imposing new rules for their young offenders such as "no texting at dinner."

 

(Source: AP)

Full story

AP

A long-time critic of the video game industry has sued Facebook for US$40 million, saying that the social networking site harmed him by not removing angry postings made by Facebook gamers.

Thompson is best know for bringing suit against Grand Theft Auto's Take Two Interactive, Sony Computer Entertainment America, and Wal-Mart, arguing that the game caused violent behavior. In 2005 episode of CBS's 60 Minutes, Thompson likened the popular video game to a "murder simulator" and blamed it for the 2003 shooting deaths of two police officers and a 911 dispatcher in Fayette, Alabama.

 

(Source: PCWorld)

Full story

PCWorld 

It's your birthday. And thanks to your Facebook profile, everybody knows that. Your wall fills up with well wishes from hundreds of "friends." Sure, it's nice to be noticed. But security experts are skeptical about whether sharing information, such as birthdays, with a broad audience is a bright idea. "It's all about providing the bad guy with intelligence," said Robert Siciliano, CEO of IDtheftsecurity.com.

Many people use their birthdate in passwords and personal identification numbers, and security questions often ask for it to resend a lost password. So broadcasting a birthdate could help cybercriminals pose as others as they log on to various Web sites, experts warned.

 

(Source: CNN)

Full story

CNN

Cybersecurity researchers often scare the IT world with tales of brilliant and devious hacks: encryption cracking techniques, wi-fi booby-traps and undetected vulnerability data sold on the black market. But the most common path cybercriminals use to gain access to victims' PCs today, according to a new report, is far more mundane: buggy software that users and IT administrators fail to patch for months, long after fixes are publicly available.

The study to be released Tuesday by the security-focused SANS Institute states that the cybersecurity community is facing an epidemic of unpatched software, particularly widely used applications like Adobe Flash, Java and Microsoft programs like Word and PowerPoint.

 

(Source: Forbes)

Full story

Forbes

Microsoft on Tuesday began serving up scam warnings with Bing search results for topics such as fixing credit scores or rescue from home foreclosure that are prime material for online cons.

Microsoft worked with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Postal Inspection Service, and Western Union to provide public service announcements (PSAs) in the form of advertising posted on relevant Bing results pages. Targeted in the campaign are key words related to searches for information about foreclosure rescue offers; promises to fix credit problems, and "lottery scams" in which people are told they've won prizes but must pay to collect.

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

Web surfing is no longer a solo affair. Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks have quickly become an integral part of the online culture, and with them comes a whole new array of potential security threats.

Social networking is built on the idea of sharing information openly and fostering a sense of community. Unfortunately, an online network of individuals actively sharing their experiences and seeking connections with other like-minded people can be easy prey for hackers bent on social-engineering and phishing attacks. It's important to be aware of the threats, and to maintain a healthy skepticism in your online interactions.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

The US Secret Service is trying to identify the people who launched an online poll at Facebook asking whether US President Barack Obama should be assassinated. Facebook on Monday shut down the user-generated poll, which was titled "Should Obama be killed?" and offered answer choices of yes, no, maybe, and "If he cuts my health care."

"Once we found out about it, we worked with Facebook to have it removed," Secret Service spokesman Malcolm Wiley told AFP. "We are certainly investigating; just like we would with any threat case." More than 750 Facebook users had reportedly cast votes by the time the poll was yanked from the wildly popular online social networking community.

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

A network of Russian malware writers and spammers paid hackers 43 cents for each Mac machine they infected with bogus video software, a sign that Macs have become attack targets, a security researcher said yesterday.

In a presentation Thursday at the Virus Bulletin 2009 security conference in Geneva, Switzerland, Sophos researcher Dmitry Samosseiko discussed his investigation of the Russian "Partnerka," a tangled collection of Web affiliates who rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars from spam and malware, most of the former related to phony drug sites, and much of the latter targeting Windows users with fake security software, or "scareware."

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

Next time you're recovering from trip to the emergency room, keep an eye on the young doctors tending to you. They might be chatting about your case on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and blogs.

A survey of medical schools published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 13 percent of respondents reported breaches of doctor-patient confidentiality, and 60 percent reported "unprofessional content" posted online.

 

(Source: PCWorld)

Full story

PCWorld 

Many major social networking sites are leaking information that allows third party advertising and tracking companies to associate the Web browsing habits of users with a specific person, researchers warn.

That's the conclusion of a study on the leakage of personally identifiable information on social networks done at AT&T Labs and the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. "In some cases, the leakage may be unintentional, but in others, there is clever and surreptitious anti-privacy engineering at work," the EFF said.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

They were crimes born of the Internet age -- romantic solicitations on popular Web site Craigslist that police say led to the fatal shooting of one woman and the robbery of another in Boston hotels this past spring. And it was high-tech, 21st-century sleuthing, along with some old-fashioned gumshoe detective work, that put police on the trail toward a suspect and eventually an arrest.

CNN looks at how technology was used to lead police to 23-year-old medical student Philip Markoff, who has been indicted on seven counts, including first-degree murder. Investigators knew they had crimes born of the Internet on their hands, but how were they able to use that same technology to help them find a suspect who went to great lengths to hide his tracks?

 

(Source: CNN)

Full story

CNN

Scammers are increasingly using machine-generated Twitter accounts to post messages about trendy topics, and tempt users into clicking on a link that leads to servers hosting fake Windows antivirus software, security researchers said Monday.

The latest Twitter attacks originated with malicious accounts cranked out by software, said experts at both F-Secure and Sophos. The accounts, which use variable account and user names, supposedly represent U.S. Twitter users. In some cases, the background wallpaper is customized for each account, yet another tactic to make the unwary think that a real person is responsible for the content.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

Teens and texting is a subject that's often discussed in pathological terms. They're texting in class! They're sexting! They need thumb therapy! But texting isn't always bad. In some families, it's become a primary form of communication between parents and children. In fact, one of my favorite texts from kids is the earth-shattering query "Wuz4dina?"

Psychologist Thomas W. Phelan says one of the biggest problems with teens is getting them to communicate at all, so if they're willing to text their parents, we should embrace the trend. "Instead of seeing the whole text thing as an enemy, see it as an ally."

 

(Source: AP)

Full story

AP

Decades of war and occupation have not provided an answer to that question -- but the social networking Web site now permits both options, sparking fears about an anti-Facebook cyber-war. The Golan Heights is Syrian territory that was captured by Israel during the Six-Day War in 1967. Since then it has been internationally classified as Israeli-occupied territory.

Up until recently, Facebook fans in the Golan Heights could only choose Syria as their country of origin or else leave it blank. Pro-Israel Web site honestreporting.com sought to change that, starting a group called "Facebook, Golan residents live in Israel, not Syria."

 

(Source: CNN)

Full story

CNN

A new botnet has caused a sharp spike in click fraud because it is skirting the most sophisticated filters of search engines, Web publishers and ad networks, according to Click Forensics. The company, which provides services to monitor ad campaigns for click fraud and reports on click fraud incidence every quarter, said on Thursday that the botnet's architects have figured out a way to mask it particularly well as legitimate search ad traffic.

Click Forensics is calling this the "Bahama botnet" because it was initially redirecting traffic through 200,000 parked domains in the Bahamas, although it is now using sites in Amsterdam, the U.K. and Silicon Valley.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski is expected to outline network-neutrality proposals on Monday, according to Reuters. The proposals could become rules at the FCC's October meeting.

Neutrality advocates want Internet service providers barred from blocking or slowing Internet traffic based on content. ISPs, including AT&T, Verizon Communications, and Comcast, say growing traffic needs to be managed, and they contend that neutrality could stifle innovation.

 

(Source: NewsFactor)

Full story

NewsFactor

Microsoft filed lawsuits against five companies Thursday, accusing them of using malicious advertisements to trick victims into installing software on their computers.

Typically, when a scareware ad pops up on a victim's screen, it looks like a Windows utility running some kind of security scan. It will then warn that it has found a critical security problem and direct the victim to a Web site where they can buy a product to fix the issue. DirectAd Solutions, Soft Solutions, qiweroqw.com, ote2008.info and ITmeter have used ads to "distribute malicious software or present deceptive websites that peddled scareware to unsuspecting Internet users".

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

In the economic downturn, teenagers around the world have focused their spending cuts on clothes, games and food, according to a survey by networking site Habbo Hotel.

The survey of 61,000 teenagers in more than 30 countries showed one teenager out of three is getting less money from their parents, with more than half of youngsters getting less to spend in the United States, Spain and Latin America. Some 19 percent of youngsters globally say the recession has most hurt their spending on console and computer games -- the industry for which teenagers are a key client group.

 

(Source: Reuter)

Full story

Reuter

With many who bank online now wary of phishing attacks, criminals are adding fake live-chat support windows to their Web sites to make them seem more real. RSA Security spotted the first ever of these "chat-in-the-middle" attacks in the past few hours, according to Sean Brady, a manager with the security company's identity protection and verification group.

The phishers send e-mails that direct victims to a fake Web page designed to look like a banking site. That's a standard technique, but what's different in this case is that the phishing site comes with a fake online chat option, so that scammers can talk directly with their victims.

 

(Source: PCWorld)

Full story

PCWorld

As millions of students across the world go back to school this month, 178 students from 49 countries will turn on their computers and step onto the virtual campus of the world's first global, tuition-free online university.

"Our mission is to change people's lives." Called University of the People, the non-profit comes from Israeli entrepreneur Shai Reshef who says he founded the school to provide higher education to those who might otherwise never have access to it. "We are creating a global classroom for science and allowing people to freely collaborate. We want to put high quality teaching and learning materials into the hands of anybody and everybody who wants to become a scientist,"

 

(Source: CNN)

Full story

CNN

A computer hacker who was once a federal informant and was a driving force behind one of the largest cases of identity theft in U.S. history pleaded guilty Friday in a deal with prosecutors that will send him to prison for up to 25 years.

Albert Gonzalez, 28, of Miami, admitted pulling off some of the most prominent hacking jobs of the decade. Federal authorities say tens of millions of credit and debit card numbers were stolen. Gonzalez entered guilty pleas in U.S. District Court in Boston to 19 counts of conspiracy, computer fraud, wire fraud, access device fraud and aggravated identity theft.

 

(Source: AP)

Full story

AP

Cyber criminals are taking advantage of swine flu fears with e-mails promising news on the illness which then infect computers with a virus, a Spanish computer security firm warned Friday.

The e-mails invite recipients to open a document with information claiming the H1N1 flu virus was developed by pharmaceutical firms seeking to make huge profits from the outbreak, Pandasecurity said in a statement. But if the document is opened, a virus is installed on the person's computer which can steal personal information like bank account data.

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

A third of Web users under 25 claim they don't care about their "digital tattoo" and the items they post online, says Symantec. Symantec said a "digital tattoo" is created by all the personal information web users post online and can easily be found through search engines by a potential or current employer, friends and acquaintances, or anyone who has malicious intent.

The security firm revealed that nearly two-thirds of all those surveyed had uploaded personal photographs, while 79 percent had at least part of their address online and nearly half had their mobile phone numbers online.

 

(Source: PCWorld)

Full story

PCWorld

In communist Cuba, where only state media exist locally, a vibrant blogger culture has emerged as a venue for critical commentary, a leading journalists' rights group said Thursday. "Despite vast legal and technical obstacles, a growing number of Cuban bloggers have prevailed over the regime?s tight Internet restrictions to disseminate island news and views online," said a report from the New-York based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

"The bloggers, mainly young adults from a variety of professions, have opened a new space for free expression in Cuba, while offering a fresh glimmer of hope for the rebirth of independent ideas in Cuba?s closed system."

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

President Barack Obama warned American teenagers on Tuesday of the dangers of putting too much personal information on Internet social networking sites, saying it could come back to haunt them in later life. "Well, let me give you some very practical tips. First of all, I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook, because in the YouTube age, whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life," Obama said.

The presidential words of advice follow recent studies that suggest U.S. employers are increasingly turning to sites such as Facebook and News Corp's MySpace to conduct background checks on job applicants.

 

(Source: Reuter)

Full story

Reuter

Web sites that collect information about visitors in order to target advertising on their own pages would be required to prominently disclose what information they gather. Web sites that share user information with outside advertising networks, which place ads on sites all over the Internet, would be required to obtain user approval before collecting data. Web sites that deal with sensitive personal information, such as medical and financial data, sexual orientation, Social Security numbers and other ID numbers, would be subject to the opt-in rule.

Rep. Rick Boucher, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, hopes to put in a bill governing Internet advertising.

 

(Source: AP)

Full story

AP

Parents who install a leading brand of software to monitor their kids' online activities may be unwittingly allowing the company to read their children's chat messages - and sell the marketing data gathered.

Software sold under the Sentry and FamilySafe brands can read private chats conducted through Yahoo, MSN, AOL and other services, and send back data on what kids are saying about such things as movies, music or video games. The information is then offered to businesses seeking ways to tailor their marketing messages to kids.

 

(Source: AP)

Full story

AP

China approved of Google's efforts to filter porn from search results on its China portal following state-led criticism of the links, the former head of Google China said Sunday.

Google.cn has long filtered out some results for sensitive searches. The search engine displays a notice that some results have been filtered for search terms such as "Tiananmen," the square in Beijing around which soldiers killed hundreds to disperse a student democracy protest in 1989, or for the names of major political leaders. The search engine currently displays no search results at all for "Xu Zhiyong," the name of a human rights lawyer recently detained for about one month. The results screen says the search "may touch on content that does not conform with the related laws, regulations and policies"

 

(Source: PCWorld)

Full story

PCWorld

In an age in which instant news and constant life streams from Facebook and Twitter change the way we communicate, the rules of etiquette surrounding these interactions are still evolving. What happens when I expected a phone call about something and read about it in a status update instead? What's the polite response to a distant friend posting bad news on Facebook? What to do with sensitive information?

Good etiquette on Facebook might not apply on Twitter or in an e-mail. These days, milestones like marriage, pregnancy, breakups and divorce are being described over more forms of communications than ever. Because it's so new, there is sort of a gray area of what the manners are,"

 

(Source: AP)

Full story

AP

Facebook warned Thursday that members who buy "friends" from an Australian online marketing company could face banishment from the social network. The Brisbane-based firm, uSocial.net, offered this week to sell a Facebook user 1,000 friends for 177 dollars and 5,000 friends -- on a standard profile account -- for 654 dollars. USocial caused a stir earlier this year with a similar offer to users of popular micro-blogging service Twitter seeking to increase their number of followers.

Facebook fired back against uSocial on Thursday and issued a reminder that it was against its terms of service for a user to access an account belonging to someone else or to share a password.

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

Ben Alexander spent nearly every waking minute playing the video game "World of Warcraft." As a result, he flunked out of the University of Iowa. He needed help to break an addiction he calls as destructive as alcohol or drugs.

Internet addiction is not recognized as a separate disorder by the American Psychiatric Association, and treatment is not generally covered by insurance. But there are many such treatment centers in China, South Korea and Taiwan - where Internet addiction is taken very seriously - and many psychiatric experts say it is clear that Internet addiction is real and harmful.

 

(Source: AP)

Full story

AP

A coalition of 10 U.S. privacy and consumer groups has called for new federal privacy protections for Web users, including a requirement that Web sites and advertising networks get opt-in permission from individuals within 24 hours of collecting personal data and tracking online habits.

In a broad set of new recommendations for privacy regulations released Tuesday, the groups also called on the U.S. Congress to prohibit Web sites and ad networks from collecting behavioral information about children under age 18, whenever it's possible to distinguish the age of the Web user, and to require that online businesses inform consumers about the purpose of the information collection.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

Google said Tuesday's widespread Gmail outage occurred when the company took some servers offline to perform routine maintenance, causing its remaining routers to become overloaded with traffic. "We know how many people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications, and we take it very seriously when there's a problem with the service." wrote Ben Treynor, a Google vice president of engineering.

Gmail's problems were a top trending topic on Twitter, with users trading updates and posting links to blogs such as Mashable, which published a post called, "5 Things to Do While Gmail is Down." (No. 1: "Immediately flood Twitter with tweets alternately proclaiming 'Gmail is down!' and inquiring 'Is Gmail down?' ")

 

(Source: CNN)

Full story

CNN

Federal judge George Wu officially overturned the conviction of Lori Drew, who was convicted of cyberbullying 13-year-old Megan Meier to suicide. That conviction was based on the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which makes it a crime to intentionally accessing a computer system with intent to commit a crime or tort.

At trial, the jury found Drew guilty of misdemeanor violations of CFAA based on the theory that accessing MySpace with intent to harrass Meier was an unauthorized access of an interstate computer.

 

(Source: ZDNet)

Full story

ZDNet

Unlike some people have hoped, the Internet hasn't led to big changes in the socio-economic makeup of Americans engaged in civic activities, a new study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project finds. As in offline politics, people who participate in online civic life — by contacting government officials, making political or charitable donations or signing petitions, for example — tend to be richer and better educated.

There are signs that social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are driving civic engagement among younger people. On social networks, income and education levels seem to be less correlated with whether someone engages in civic activism.

 

(Source: AP)

Full story

AP

This is a story about love and Twitter, hope and the relative safety of a Walmart parking lot. Six months ago, Brianna Karp found herself living in an old truck and camper she inherited after the suicide of a father she barely knew.

She wrote as a way to stay in touch with the world. Soon, other homeless people were leaving comments on her blog, telling their stories and cheering her on. "I was definitely surprised just how many homeless and former homeless people are online and using social media to seek opportunities," Karp said. She blogged from Starbucks while she continued to search for work, buying $5 cards each month that entitled her to sip coffee and soak up unlimited Wi-Fi.

 

(Source: AP)

Full story

AP

If Google Inc. digitizes the world's books, how will it keep track of what you read? That's one of the unanswered questions that librarians and privacy experts are grappling with as Google attempts to settle a long-running lawsuit by publishers and copyright holders and move ahead with its effort to digitize millions of books, known as the Google Books Library Project.

Librarians and the online world have different standards for dealing with user information. Many libraries routinely delete borrower information, and organizations such as the American Library Association have fought hard to preserve the privacy of their patrons.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

Facebook has agreed to make worldwide changes to its privacy policy as a result of negotiations with Canada's privacy commissioner. Last month the social network was found to breach Canadian law by holding on to users' personal data indefinitely.

It will also make it clear that users can deactivate or delete their account. "These changes mean that the privacy of 200 million Facebook users in Canada and around the world will be far better protected," said Canadian privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart.

 

(Source: BBC)

Full story

BBC

There's still plenty of room for innovation today, yet the openness fostering it may be eroding. While the Internet is more widely available and faster than ever, artificial barriers threaten to constrict its growth. Call it a mid-life crisis. A variety of factors are to blame. Spam and hacking attacks force network operators to erect security firewalls.

"There is more freedom for the typical Internet user to play, to communicate, to shop — more opportunities than ever before," said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor and co-founder of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. "On the worrisome side, there are some longer-term trends that are making it much more possible (for information) to be controlled."

 

(Source: AP)

Full story

AP

Users of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter could face higher insurance premiums because burglars may be using them to find out their personal details. The Digital Criminal report, which polled 2,000 social network users, found nearly two fifths had posted details of their holiday plans, with nearly two thirds of 16-24 year-olds doing so.

"I call it 'internet shopping for burglars'. It is incredibly easy to use social neyworking sites to target people, and then scope out more information on their actual home using other internet sites like Google Street View, all from the comfort of the sofa."

 

(Source: Telegraph)

Full story

Telegraph

A vulnerability in Twitter Inc.'s popular microblogging service remains unfixed and can be used by criminals to hijack accounts or redirect users to malicious Web sites, a developer claimed today. The cross-site scripting bug in Twitter allows hackers to insert malicious JavaScript into tweets simply by adding code to a field of an API used by third-party Twitter application developers.

A software developer, a U.K.-based search optimization specialist, Slater recommended that, until Twitter patches the vulnerability, users should stop following any Twitterers they don't personally know or trust. "Who's to say they're not already stealing your details? If you don't see their tweets, they can't harm you,"

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

Users of social networks are concerned about security but few are taking the steps necessary to protect themselves against online crime, according to a survey released on Wednesday.

Nearly 20 percent of those surveyed said they have experienced identity theft, 47 percent have been victims of malware infections and 55 percent have seen "phishing" attacks, in which hackers seek to capture password information. They also suggested that passwords be changed at least once a month and that friends or coworkers not be allowed to access one's personal computer.

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

Fans searching for "Jessica Biel" or "Jessica Biel downloads," "Jessica Biel wallpaper," "Jessica Biel screen savers," "Jessica Biel photos," and "Jessica Biel videos" have a one in five chance of landing at a Web site that has tested positive for online threats such as spyware, adware, spam, phishing, viruses and other malware. McAfee's conclusion: Searching for the latest celebrity news and downloads can cause serious damage to personal computers.

"Consumers' obsession with celebrity news and culture is harmless in theory, but one bad download can cause a lot of damage to a computer."

 

(Source: NewsFactor)

Full story

NewsFactor

Internet criminals might be rethinking a favorite scam for stealing people's personal information. A report being released Wednesday by IBM Corp. shows a big drop in the volume of "phishing" e-mails, in which fraud artists send what looks like a legitimate message from a bank or some other company. If the recipients click on a link in a phishing e-mail, they land on a rogue Web site that captures their passwords, account numbers or any other information they might enter.

To protect yourself against phishing, access sensitive sites on your own, rather than by following links in e-mails, which might lead to phishing sites.

 

(Source: AP)

Full story

AP

The average gamer, far from being a teen, is actually a 35-year-old man who is overweight, aggressive, introverted — and often depressed, according to a report out this week from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The study also shows that when children and teenagers become game players, a trend toward physical inactivity and corresponding health problems extends -- and is exacerbated -- into adulthood.

"Among researchers, there is growing concern and uncertainty about the health consequences of video game playing," the CDC reported.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

The German government warned job-seekers Friday to avoid posting potentially compromising pictures or remarks on social networking sites such as Facebook, citing a study about their use by employers. Consumer affairs minister Ilse Aigner "calls on citizens who use the Internet often to think about what they put online," a spokeswoman for her ministry told a regular government news conference.

28 percent of the around 500 German companies polled searched for information about their would-be employees' hobbies, political opinions and personal lives.

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

Albert Gonzalez, the man described by federal authorities as the kingpin of a gang responsible for stealing more than 130 million payment cards, is a computer addict constantly looking for ways to challenge his abilities, according to his lawyer. He has had an unhealthy obsession with computers since the age of 8. "He was self-taught, He didn't go out in the sandbox or play baseball. The computer was his best friend."

"It wasn't healthy. It's a sickness. It's a problem that has not been addressed in our society."

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

Switzerland's data protection watchdog on Friday demanded that Google immediately withdraw the "Street View" facility it has started offering on its map of Switzerland. Federal data protection and transparency officer Hanspeter Thuer released a statement warning that the US-based Internet giant was not respecting conditions he set to respect personal privacy in Switzerland.

The online service, which began in the United States, has sparked controversy because the snapshots also inadvertently capture passers-by on camera, sometimes in embarrassing or private moments.

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

The first US retreat for Internet addicts has opened its doors, welcoming a teenager that was captive to World of Warcraft online role-playing videogame. The 19-year-old boy went from pursuing quests in Azeroth to bottle-feeding baby goats and building a chicken coop as part of a reStart Internet Addiction Recovery Program at a rural five acre spread in the state of Washington.

"It is about helping people addicted to technology get through the withdrawal and help their brains get wired back to normal and connected to the world in a positive way. Games are really designed to keep people hooked. Those that stay hooked are people really vulnerable for whom the world is painful or scary."

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

Facebook, for better or worse, is like being at a big party with all your friends, family, acquaintances and co-workers. There are lots of fun, interesting people you're happy to talk to when they stroll up.

Sure, Facebook can be a great tool for keeping up with folks who are important to you. But far more posts read like navel-gazing diary entries, or worse, spam. A recent study categorized 40 percent of Twitter tweets as "pointless babble," and it wouldn't be surprising if updates on Facebook, still a fast-growing social network, break down in a similar way. Here are 12 of the most annoying types of Facebook users:

 

(Source: CNN)

Full story

CNN

A Canadian model has won a landmark case in a New York court after Google was forced to disclose the online identity of a blogger who anonymously posted derogatory comments about the Vogue covergirl. The ruling came after Liskula Cohen, 36, filed suit in a bid to unmask the identify of her tormentor, who posted suggestive photographs of Cohen on the blog and described her as a "ho" and a "psychotic, lying, whoring... skank."

Google said that while the company does not tolerate "cyber bullying" it is also respectful of privacy. "We sympathize with anyone who may be the victim of cyber bullying,"

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

The clock is ticking, people are dying and a flu virus is sweeping the globe -- that is the scenario of a new computer game designed to make people think about how to respond to the swine flu pandemic. In "The Great Flu", players must choose whether or not to stockpile anti-viral drugs and deploy research teams to new areas of outbreak as the number of infections and deaths rises and more countries are affected.

"The game is very realistic and has an educational value. It informs people how the virus spreads, what the flu is and on the ways to fight the pandemic."

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

US prosecutors have charged a man with stealing data relating to 130 million credit and debit cards. Officials say it is the biggest case of identity theft in American history.

They say Albert Gonzalez, 28, and two un-named Russian co-conspirators hacked into the payment systems of retailers, including the 7-Eleven chain. Prosecutors say they aimed to sell the data on. If convicted, Mr Gonzalez faces up to 20 years in jail for wire fraud and five years for conspiracy.

 

(Source: BBC)

Full story

BBC

A new hacking incident report warns there has been a steep rise in attacks at social-networking hotspots including wildly popular microblogging service Twitter. Hackers aren't just hunting for victims in the flocks of people at social networks, they're also using Twitter to command "botnet" armies of infected computers, according to Internet security specialists.

"A lot of Web 2.0 widgets, mashups and the like that users go for make it easy for all these guys to launch attacks." Facebook became an Internet star after opening its platform to widgets, mini-applications made by outside developers, and now boasts more than 250 million members.

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

The Twitter micro-blogging service was knocked offline this morning for several hours as a result of a denial of service attack (DDoS). Twitter has confirmed and reported the attack in a post on its official blog earlier today: "We are defending against this [DDos] attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate." The company later reported that the service as been resumed but they are still continuing to defend against and recover from this attack. No further updates have been provided yet. Several sources are also reporting problems with Facebook today.

(Source: CircleID)

Full story

CircleID

The 24-year-old Singaporean research analyst is constantly on the lookout for attack manuals, video clips of Islamist militants in training and fiery extremist chatter that could hint at an imminent assault somewhere.

Nur Azlin is one of five research analysts at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies who monitor extremist websites daily to get a sense of an emerging battleground in the fight against terrorism. There are an estimated 5,500-6,000 websites worldwide peddling extremist ideas, according to the researchers.

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

A researcher looking into the attacks that knocked Twitter offline last week discovered another, unrelated security problem. At least one criminal was using a Twitter account to control a network of a couple hundred infected personal computers, mostly in Brazil.

Networks of infected PCs are referred to as "botnets" and are responsible for so much of the mayhem online, from identity theft to spamming to the types of attacks that crippled Twitter. A Twitter account that was used to send out what looked like garbled messages. But they were actually commands for computers in a botnet to visit malicious Web sites, where they download programs that steal banking passwords.

 

(Source: AP)

Full story

AP

Children are using the Internet to watch YouTube videos, connect with friends on social network sites and look up "sex" and "porn", according to a study of the top Web searches by youngsters. The words "sex" and "porn" also made it into the top 10, ranked numbers four and six respectively.

"It also helps identify "teachable moments" when parents should be talking with their kids about appropriate online behavior and other issues in their kids' online lives," California-based Symantec's Internet safety advocate Marian Merritt said in a statement.

 

(Source: Reuter)

Full story

Reuter

The investigation into the attacks against high-profile Web sites in South Korea and the U.S. is a winding, twisty electronic goose chase that may not result in a definitive conclusion on the identity of the attackers.

Computer security experts disagree over the skill level of the DDOS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks, which over the course of a few days in early July caused problems for some of the Web sites targeted, including South Korean banks, U.S. government agencies and media outlets. The DDOS attack was executed by a botnet, or a group of computers infected with malicious software controlled by a hacker. That malware was programmed to attack the Web sites by bombarding them with page requests that far exceed normal visitor traffic. As a result, some of the weaker sites buckled.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

Fraudsters are taking advantage of the widely used but obscure Automated Clearing House (ACH) Network in order to pull off their attacks. This financial network is used by financial institutions to handle direct deposits, checks, bill payments and cash transfers between businesses and individuals.

The fraud typically starts with a targeted phishing e-mail, aimed at whomever is in charge of the company's checkbook. By tricking the victim into running software, opening a harmful attachment or visiting a malicious Web site, the criminals are able to install keylogging software and steal bank account passwords.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

Worried that your relationship is going south? Maybe it's time to get off Facebook. A study released by the University of Guelph in Ontario shows that the Facebook social network increases jealousy in users' romantic relationships. The study, which was published in the latest issue of CyberPsychology and Behaviour, concluded that the more time people spend on Facebook, the more jealous they get.

"This may include details about their partner's friendships and social exchanges, especially interactions with previous romantic or sexual partners." The simple availability of information -- whether it's a girlfriend's posts, or photos and details about her friends and exes -- seems to increase a person's desire to search for even more information, say researchers.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

The outage that knocked Twitter offline for hours was traced to an attack on a lone blogger in the former Soviet republic of Georgia - but the collateral damage that left millions around the world tweetless showed just how much havoc an isolated cyberdispute can cause.

"It told us how quickly many people really took Twitter into their hearts," Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, said Friday. Tens of millions of people have come to rely on social media to express their innermost thoughts and to keep up with world news and celebrity gossip. Twitter "is one of those little amusements that infiltrated the mass behavior in some significant ways, so that when it went away, a lot of people really noticed it and missed it."

 

(Source: AP)

Full story

AP

A group of teenagers have reacted to warnings that using sites like Facebook, Bebo and Myspace can leave them traumatised. The Archbishop of Westminster, the Most Reverend Vincent Nichols, says the sites encourage users to value the number rather than quality of friends they have.

He’s worried this makes people get too many temporary friends instead of real, genuine ones. He said: “It’s an all or nothing syndrome that you have to have in an attempt to shore up identity. "Friendship is not a commodity, friendship is something that is hard work and enduring when it’s right.”

 

(Source: BBC)

Full story

BBC

The distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks that knocked out Twitter for hours and affected other sites like Facebook, Google's Blogger, and LiveJournal on Thursday continued all day Friday and may persist throughout the weekend. In its latest update, posted to a discussion forum of its third-party developers at 11 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time on Friday, Twitter reports it's still fighting the attacks.

"The DDoS attack is still ongoing, and the intensity has not decreased at all," wrote Chad Etzel, from Twitter's application development platform support team.

 

(Source: PCWorld)

Full story

PCWorld

Micro-blogging service Twitter and social networking site Facebook have been severely disrupted by hackers. Twitter was taken offline for more than two hours whilst Facebook's service was "degraded", according to the firms.

The popular sites were subject to so-called denial-of-service attacks on Thursday, the companies believe. Denial-of-service (DOS) attacks take various forms but often involve a company's servers being flooded with data in an effort to disable them.

 

(Source: BBC)

Full story

BBC

The US Marine Corps on Tuesday renewed a ban on Twitter and other social networking sites as the Pentagon weighed a similar prohibition over cybersecurity concerns. The Marines had already banned the use of social media on military networks but issued a more detailed order this week defining which sites were out of bounds and noting possible exceptions to the rule, Marine Corps spokesman Lieutenant Craig Thomas told AFP.

"These Internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries," the Marine Corps said in an order posted on its website.

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

In hindsight, it seems so obvious. We look back at the creepy online ramblings of a tortured soul like George Sodini and realize we should have known all along of the horrors to come. That is, if anyone actually read Sodini's Web page before he sprayed bullets into a suburban Pittsburgh fitness class, killing three women and then himself.

Certainly, anyone happening upon Sodini's tortured online thoughts before his rampage Tuesday would have had ample cause for alarm. His date of death is listed right at the top, under his name and birthdate: "DOD 8/4/2009." Later, a description of his first attempt at what he calls "this project," in January. "It is 8:45 p.m.: I chickened out! I brought the loaded guns, everything. Hell!" And then, on Monday: "Tomorrow is the big day."

 

(Source: AP)

Full story

AP

Police are searching for a missing schoolgirl, believed to have run away with a man she met on the internet site Bebo. Clare Haver, 14, of Bourne, Lincolnshire, has been missing since July 25 and is thought to be with 23-year-old Michael Ellis. Police revealed today that Ellis has mental health issues and appealed for Haver to return to her family.

She met jobless Ellis, of Lincoln, on the social networking site Bebo seven months ago. The week before last he joined her while she was on a camping trip with a friend in Skegness.

 

(Source: Times)

Full story

Times

Parents have been warned of a new teenage trend of "sexting", in which children exchange explicit photos of themselves by text. More than a third of secondary school children have been sent messages containing sexual content, a survey showed.

Researchers found youngsters were regularly being sent sex texts or "sexts" - often by their school friends. The messages contain images of sex acts involving young people but more generally of boys and girls exposing themselves. Material is sent to mobile phones via texts, transferred using Bluetooth or uploaded to social networking groups. Girls are bullied into taking, and sharing, explicit pictures of themselves, the charity warned.

 

(Source: Telegraph)

Full story

Telegraph

A powerful new type of Internet attack works like a telephone tap, except operates between computers and Web sites they trust.

Hackers at the Black Hat and DefCon security conferences have revealed a serious flaw in the way Web browsers weed out untrustworthy sites and block anybody from seeing them. If a criminal infiltrates a network, he can set up a secret eavesdropping post and capture credit card numbers, passwords and other sensitive data flowing between computers on that network and sites their browsers have deemed safe.

 

(Source: AP)

Full story

AP

Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites are inceasingly being targeted by cyber-criminals drawn to the wealth of personal information supplied by users, experts warn. Data posted on the sites -- name, date of birth, address, job details, email and phone numbers -- is a windfall for hackers, participants at Campus Party, one of the world's biggest gatherings of Internet enthusiasts, said.

A vicious virus Koobface -- "koob" being "book" in reverse -- has affected thousands Facebook and Twitter users since August 2008, said Asier Martinez, a security specialist at global IT solutions provider Panda Security.

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

Microsoft released a security patch on Tuesday aimed at preventing hackers from exploiting a vulnerability in its Web browser, Internet Explorer.

The US software giant said that the security update would be automatically installed for Internet Explorer users who have automatic updating enabled on their computers but would need to be installed manually by other users. "These vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer," Microsoft said.

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is about to rule whether health care entities will need to notify patients if their de-identified data -- patient data that has been stripped of all potential for identifying individuals, which is often used for research and development -- is breached. As it stands now, de-identified data is not subject to the new breach-notification rules imposed by the HITECH privacy provisions of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) stimulus package. The debate pits privacy activists on the one side -- who often support notification -- with health care organizations on the other, which say the quality of health care hangs in the balance.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

Amid concerns that the U.S. has a shortage of cybersecurity professionals, a new consortium of U.S. government and private organizations aims to identify students with strong computer skills and train them as cybersecurity guardians, warriors and "top guns."

The U.S. Cyber Challenge initiative will bring together three cybersecurity competitions for high school or college students and launch new in-person competitions, said Alan Paller, research director at the SANS Institute, a cybersecurity training organization. The organizers of the U.S. Cyber Challenge also plan to offer scholarships to promising students and hook them up with internships and jobs, Paller said.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

 

The news report begins with shots of a tense space shuttle launch. Engineers hunch over computer banks and techno music pounds in the background. There is a countdown, a lift-off, and then you see a young man in a black T-shirt and sunglasses, apparently reporting from space.

This is the Hacker News Network, and after a decade offline it is lifting off again, this time with a quirky brand of video reports about security. They're the guys who famously told the U.S. Congress that they could take down the Internet in about 30 minutes, and who helped invent the way that security bugs are reported to computer companies.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

Federal agencies are facing a severe shortage of computer specialists, even as a growing wave of coordinated cyberattacks against the government poses potential national security risks, a private study found.

The study describes a fragmented federal cyber force, where no one is in charge of overall planning and government agencies are "on their own and sometimes working at cross purposes or in competition with one another." The report, scheduled to be released Wednesday, arrives in the wake of a series of cyberattacks this month that shut down some U.S. and South Korean government and financial Web sites.

 

(Source: AP)

Full story

AP

Hackers will soon gain a powerful new tool for breaking into Oracle Corp's (ORCL.O) database, the top-selling business software used by companies to store electronic information.

Security experts have developed an easy-to-use, automated software tool that can remotely break into Oracle databases over the Internet to simulate attacks on computer systems, but cybercrooks can use it for hacking. The tool's authors created it through a controversial open-source software project known as Metasploit, which releases its free software over the Web.

 

(Source: Reuter)

Full story

Reuter

Being the chief executive has its privileges. And one of them may be a blissful ignorance of your company's data breach risks.

According to a study to be released Tuesday by the privacy-focused Ponemon Institute, companies' chief executives tend to value cybersecurity just as--if not more--highly than their executive colleagues. But compared to lower-level execs, CEOs also tend to underestimate the frequency of cyberthreats their organization faces.

 

(Source: Forbes)

Full story

Forbes

The popularity of Facebook and other popular social networking sites has given hackers new ways to steal both money and information, the security company Sophos said in a report released on Wednesday.

About half of all companies block some or all access to social networks because of concerns about cyber incursions via the sites, according to the study. "Research findings also revealed that 63 percent of system administrators worry that employees share too much personal information via their social networking sites, putting their corporate infrastructure -- and the sensitive data stored on it -- at risk," the Sophos report said.

 

(Source: Reuter)

Full story

Reuter

The popular social networking site Facebook is not doing enough to protect the personal information it gets from subscribers, and it gives users confusing and incomplete information about privacy matters, Canada's privacy commissioner said on Thursday.

"It's clear that privacy issues are top of mind for Facebook, and yet we found serious privacy gaps in the way the site operates," Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said in a report on an investigation into Facebook.

 

(Source: Reuter)

Full story

Reuter

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the number of people using the online social networking service has climbed to 250 million.

Palo Alto, California-based Facebook was founded in 2004 and has become the most popular online social networking service, eclipsing News Corporation-owned MySpace.

"The rapid pace of our growth is humbling and exciting for us," Zuckerberg said in a message posted at Facebook's official blog. "For us, growing to 250 million users isn't just an impressive number; it is a mark of how many personal connections all of you have made."

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

The U.K. was the likely source of a series of attacks last week that took down popular Web sites in the U.S. and South Korea, according to an analysis performed by a Vietnamese computer security analyst. The address is registered to Global Digital Broadcast in the U.K. "Having located the attacking source in U.K., we believed that it is completely possible to find out the hacker," Nguyen wrote.

The results contradict assertions made by some in the U.S. and South Korean governments that North Korea was behind the attack. Security analysts had been skeptical of the claims, which were reportedly made in off-the-record briefings and for which proof was never delivered.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

The microblogging service Twitter is taking legal advice after hundreds of documents were hacked into and published by a number of blogs.

"We are in touch with our legal counsel about what this theft means for Twitter, the hacker and anyone who accepts...or publishes these stolen documents, " said Twitter's Biz Stone. In a blog posting he wrote that "About a month ago, an administrative employee here at Twitter was targeted and her personal email account was hacked.

 

(Source: BBC)

Full story

BBC

As such, Facebook is quickly becoming a hotbed of activity for all kinds of malware and financial scams. With 200 million registered users, Facebook represents an ocean of fish which are all accessible in one convenient place. It helps that many Facebook users are relatively unsophisticated at the web and especially the complex security issues surrounding it, and are thus more susceptible to attacks delivered via the social network.

Facebook says it's doing its part to fight the problem, but it can't monitor every bit that passes through its servers. Less than 1 percent of its users have been victimized over the last five years, it says. That sounds good, until you realize that could be up to 2 million people, hardly a drop in the bucket.

 

(Source: Yahoo)

Full story

Yahoo

A British hacker who has been fighting extradition to the United States for seven years today made an eleventh-hour appeal to a British court to be tried in the U.K. instead of in a U.S. federal court.

Gary McKinnon, 43, has admitted that in 2001 he broke into U.S. Department of Defense, NASA and U.S. Army computer systems. However, McKinnon has been using a series of legal maneuvers and appeals to fight extradition to the U.S. since he was indicted in November 2002 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on charges related to the computer hacks.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

Microsoft Corp warned that cybercriminals have attacked users of its Office software for Windows PCs, exploiting a programing flaw that the software giant has yet to repair. The world's largest software maker issued the warning on Tuesday as it released patches to address nine other security holes in its software.

Cybercriminals target Microsoft programs because they are so widely used, allowing them to go after the largest number of potential victims with one set of code. (Windows runs more than 90 percent of the world's PCs. Office has some 500 million users).

 

(Source: Reuter)

Full story

Reuter

Cyber criminals are aping executives when it comes to sales, marketing and risk management in the world of online treachery, according to a report released by networking giant Cisco.

"A lot of techniques they are using today are not new; it is really about how they may be doing some of the same old things," said Cisco chief security researcher Patrick Peterson.

Criminals have taken to sending blanket text messages to numbers based on area codes of local banks directing people to call into a service center to address supposed concerns about their accounts.

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

The defendant in the case of a MySpace hoax that ended in a girl's suicide applauded a federal judge for tentatively dismissing her conviction that could have resulted in up to three years in prison.

Prosecutors had argued that Drew and an accomplice, who was granted immunity, pretended to be a teenage boy named Josh, and used that identity to at first flirt with 13-year-old Megan Meier, an emotionally troubled classmate of Drew's daughter, before turning on her.

 

(Source: People)

Full story

People

Computer security experts were divided Thursday on whether North Korea was behind the ongoing attacks on US and South Korean websites, an assault that highlighted the vulnerabilities of the Web.

The so-called distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack used an army of malware-infected computers known as a "botnet" in a bid to paralyze US and South Korean websites by overwhelming them with traffic.

Around a dozen websites in the United States, including those of the White House, State Department and Pentagon, and another dozen in South Korea were among those targeted in the attack which began on Sunday.

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

New York's attorney general charged Thursday that Tagged.com stole the identities of more than 60 million Internet users worldwide — by sending e-mails that raided their private accounts. Andrew Cuomo said he plans to sue the social networking Web site for deceptive marketing and invasion of privacy.

"This company stole the address books and identities of millions of people," Cuomo said in a statement. "Consumers had their privacy invaded and were forced into the embarrassing position of having to apologize to all their e-mail contacts for Tagged's unethical — and illegal — behavior."

 

(Source: AP)

Full story

AP

A botnet comprised of about 50,000 infected computers has been waging a war against U.S. government Web sites and causing headaches for businesses in the U.S. and South Korea.

The attack started Saturday, and security experts have credited it with knocking the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's (FTC's) Web site offline for parts of Monday and Tuesday. Several other government Web sites have also been targeted, including the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT).

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

A Long Island, New York, social worker is facing two misdemeanor charges after allegedly posting a sexually suggestive ad on Craigslist that gave interested parties the home phone number of a 9-year-old girl.

Officials told CNN affiliate News 12 in Long Island that the Craigslist ad read "I need a little affection... I'm blond, I'm cute and I'll be waiting." Interested parties were directed to an e-mail address where they were given the girl's name and home phone number. Callers were unaware they were trying to reach a 9-year-old.

 

(Source: CNN)

Full story

CNN

A U.S. district court has ordered key players in an international spam ring to give up $3.7 million that they made by sending out illegal e-mail messages pitching bogus hoodia weight-loss products and a “human growth hormone” pill they claimed reversed the aging process.

In a Federal Trade Commission law enforcement action, the court found that the five defendants, located in Canada and St. Kitts, violated the FTC Act and the CAN-SPAM Act by participating in the spam operation. The court order bars the defendants from violating the CAN-SPAM Act and from making false or unsubstantiated claims about the health benefits of any food, drug, or dietary supplement.

 

(Source: Federal Trade Commission)

Full story

Federal Trade Commission

The Obama administration is moving cautiously on a new pilot program that would both detect and stop cyber attacks against government computers, while trying to ensure citizen privacy protections.

Any involvement of the NSA - the agency oversees electronic intelligence-gathering - in protecting domestic computer networks worries privacy and civil liberties groups who oppose giving such control to U.S. spy agencies.

 

(Source: AP)

Full story

AP

Lori Drew, 50, pretended to be a boy on the MySpace website to befriend Megan Meier, who hanged herself after the virtual friendship ended. Sentencing will take place this week in the first federal cyber bullying case in the US which was brought to trial after a teenage girl took her own life.

The US National Crime Prevention Council in a report last year found that 43% of teens are exposed to cyber bullying in one form or another yet only one in 10 kids told their parents. "Cyber bullying can have such a devastating effect on our young people from depression to falling grades and low self esteem. This case shows however that cyber bullying is not something that just young people commit but we as adults can also be at fault," said the council's Michelle Boykin.

 

(Source: BBC)

Full story

BBC

The head of the U.S. Secret Service on Tuesday signed a memorandum of understanding with the head of the Italian police and the chief executive officer of the Italian Postal Service to set up an international task force to combat cyber crime.

"This is not a borderless crime and we believe there needs to be a reaction at an international level. We'll provide all our resources to make that happen," Mark Sullivan, the director of the U.S. Secret Service, said after signing the accord at a ceremony at the Italian interior ministry.

 

(Source: CIO)

Full story

CIO

A blind Boston-area teenager was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison Friday for hacking into the telephone network and harassing the Verizon investigator who was building a case against him.

Matthew Weigman, 19, was part of a group of telephone hackers that met up on telephone party lines and was associated with more than 60 "swatting" calls to 911 numbers across the country. Weigman, known as "Little Hacker," became involved in telephone hacking around age 14 and continued to operate until last year.

 

(Source: PCWorld)

Full story

PCWorld

Within hours of the death of pop star Michael Jackson, spam trading on his demise hit in-boxes, a security firm said as it warned that more junk mail was in the offing. Just eight hours after news broke about Jackson, Abingdon, England-based Sophos PLC started tracking the first wave of Jackson spam, which used a subject line of "Confidential -- Michael Jackson."

The spam wasn't pitching a product or leading users to a phishing or malware Web site. Instead it was trying to dupe users into replying to the message in order to collect e-mail addresses and verify them as legitimate.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

Police in western Switzerland have broken a paedophile online network operating in nearly 80 different countries, the official Swissinfo.ch news website reported Sunday.

At least 32 people across Switzerland are now under investigation due to suspected connections with the case, the website quoted police in the canton of Vaud as saying.

A police official said cybercrime experts in Lausanne were alerted by Interpol more than a year ago that pornographic details were hidden on a website for hip-hop music run by a webmaster in western Switzerland.

 

(Source: Mathaba)

Full story

Mathaba

China on Thursday stepped up accusations that Google is spreading obscene content over the Internet, a day after U.S. officials urged Beijing to abandon plans for controversial filtering software on new computers.

The growing friction over control of online content threatens to become another irritant in ties at a time the world is looking for the United States and China to cooperate in helping to pull the global economy out of its slump.

China's Foreign Ministry on Thursday accused Google's English language search engine of spreading obscene images that violated the nation's laws, less than 24 hours after disruptions to the company's search engines and other services within China.

 

(Source: Reuter)

Full story

Reuter

Recently scammers have become more aggressive on the site. They will set up new accounts and post spam messages on hot topics in hopes of gaining clicks when people search through Twitter.

And while hacked Twitter accounts are still rare, they're a much more effective way to reach victims, according to Rik Ferguson, a researcher with Trend Micro. "If you can take over an account that has a couple of thousand followers then you can get a much better return on your investment."

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

The US military announced a new "cyber command" designed to wage digital warfare and to bolster defenses against mounting threats to its computer networks. The move reflects a shift in military strategy with "cyber dominance" now part of US war doctrine and comes amid growing alarm over the perceived threat posed by digital espionage coming from China, Russia and elsewhere.

President Barack Obama has put a top priority on cyber security and announced plans for a national cyber defense coordinator. A recent White House policy review said that "cybersecurity risks pose some of the most serious economic and national security challenges of the 21st century." Obama has promised privacy rights would be carefully safeguarded even as the government moves to step up efforts to protect sensitive civilian and military networks.

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

A woman who won a retrial after a $220,000 verdict against her for sharing music files has now been ordered to pay $1.92 million by a jury in Minnesota.

In 2007, when she lost the original suit, Jammie Thomas-Rasset was one of the first people to receive a guilty verdict in a case backed by the Recording Industry Association of America, which has filed more than 20,000 lawsuits against people in a bid to stop online music trading and copyright infringement.

On Thursday, a jury ordered her to pay $80,000 for each of the 24 songs she is accused of illegally trading over the Kazaa Internet service. The jury could have ordered her to pay between $750 and $150,000 per song. In a statement, the RIAA said it was pleased that the jury found the defendant liable and that it continues to be willing to settle the case.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

The United Nations has appealed to parents, the Internet industry and policy-makers to join hands to eradicate hate speech from cyberspace.

Addressing a day-long seminar titled "Unlearning Intolerance" on the danger of "cyberhate," UN chief Ban Ki-moon lauded the benefits of the Internet but regretted that "there are those who use information technology to reinforce stereotypes, to spread misinformation and propagate hate." "Some of the newest technologies are being used to peddle some of the oldest fears," he warned, decrying what he called "digital demonization... targeting innocents because of their faith, their raace, their ethnicity, their sexual orientation."

 

(Source: UN)

Full story

United Nations

Social networks like Facebook and Twitter are exploding in popularity, bringing people from all walks of life together online. At the same time though, overall Internet use keeping family members apart.

Forty-three percent of all online users are involved with a social networking site, and that's up from just 27% a year ago, according to a report released today by The Conference Board, a non-profit research association. The report also notes that more than half of those who use social networks log on at least once a day, and the majority log on several times a day.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

An alleged spammer could face jail time in connection with a Facebook lawsuit after a judge referred him to the U.S. Attorney General's Office for criminal proceedings.

Judge Jeremy Fogel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California referred Sanford Wallace (who has been dubbed a "spam king" for his long and aggressive history in e-mail marketing) l to the U.S. Attorney General's Office for criminal proceedings for allegedly violating an injunction that prohibited him from accessing Facebook.

Facebook filed a lawsuit against Wallace and two other men in February for spamming and phishing schemes through the social-networking site. The following week, Judge Fogel issued a temporary restraining order barring Wallace and two other alleged spammers, Adam Arzoomanian and Scott Shaw, from accessing Facebook's network.

 

(Source: PCWorld)

Full story

PCWorld

A federal grand jury in New Jersey today indicted three people, and five people were arrested in Italy, all in connection with hacking into the IT systems of thousands of companies around the world to gain free access to telephone services, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Newark, N.J.

A multinational team of investigators worked jointly to round up the alleged hackers and their financial backers in the scheme to gain access into the systems of many companies -- 2,500 in the U.S. alone -- to steal access codes that the victim companies used to route phone calls through telecom systems, the office said.

The value of all the stolen services was unclear, though the U.S. Attorney's Office said the thieves routed more than $55 million worth of telephone calls over telecommunications networks in the U.S. "This was an extensive and well-organized criminal network that worked across continents," said New Jersey's acting U.S. attorney, Ralph J. Marra Jr., in a statement.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

After a two weeks meeting in Bonn Germany, it appears that an ambitious and effective global pact to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is in sight.

“A big achievement of this meeting is that governments have made it clearer what they want to see in the Copenhagen agreed outcome,” said Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.The Copenhagen outcome is to follow on the first phase of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which expires at the end of 2012. The negotiating text under consideration covers issues of a shared vision for long-term cooperative action, enhanced action on adaptation, mitigation and finance, as well as technology and capacity-building.

The gathering in Germany, which brought together more than 4,600 participants from government, business and industry, environmental groups and research institutions, was the second in a series of five major UN negotiating sessions slated for this year ahead of Copenhagen. The next meeting is scheduled to be held from 10 to 14 August in Bonn, followed by sessions in Bangkok from 28 September to 9 October and Barcelona from 2 to 6 November.

Source: UN

Full Report

Press Release

 

Every time you swipe your credit card and wait for the transaction to be approved, sensitive data including your name and account number are ferried from store to bank through computer networks, each step a potential opening for hackers.

And while you may take steps to protect yourself against identity theft, an Associated Press investigation has found the banks and other companies that handle your information are not being nearly as cautious as they could. The government leaves it to card companies to design security rules that protect the nation's 50 billion annual transactions.

 

(Source: AP)

Full story

AP

While most viruses target PC users, there has been rise in the number of attacks on Mac systems. Graham Cluley, a security expert with anti-virus firm Sophos, told the BBC that the small number of Mac viruses had made some users complacent.

Security experts have discovered two novel forms of Mac OS X malware. OSX/Tored-A - an updated version of the Mac OS Tored worm - and a Trojan called OSX/Jahlav-C were both found on popular pornographic websites. Users logging on to these sites are asked to download a "missing Video ActiveX Object" but are sent a virus payload instead.

 

(Source: BBC)

Full story

BBC

The takedown last week of a rogue ISP by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) slashed spam volumes by about 15% and reduced the spam spewed by a pair of big-name botnets by as much as to just 64%, a security firm said today.

"Spam dropped 15% across the board," said Bradley Anstis, director of technology strategy at Marshal8e6. "We especially noticed [the drop] over the weekend," he said, adding that the decline picked up steam slowly.

Last Tuesday, a federal court ordered the plug pulled on 3FN, an ISP operated by Belize-based Pricewert, after the FTC complained that the company hosts spam botnet command-and-control servers, as well as sites operated by child pornographers, identity thieves and other criminals.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

A mobile phone-based health project is helping the Peruvian military to keep disease at bay. The initiative, dubbed Alerta DISAMAR, has allowed doctors in the navy to report disease outbreaks and ask for help with treatment. The scheme was set up following the deaths of two Peruvian sailors in 2001 from malaria and is part of a wider mHealth project by the United Nations-Vodafone Foundation. Since it was set up in 2003 it has provided invaluable information for epidemiologists and enabled them to track the spread of diseases. It is also a useful way of gathering statistics on disease for health planning. To date, over 80,000 cases have been reported - everything from snakebites to yellow fever.

The US navy helped establish the product and a firm called Voxiva developed the technical aspects, under advice from Ernesto Gozzer, a doctor who specialises in public health.

Source: BBC

Read full Report: here

 

A Hampton, New Hampshire, man has pleaded guilty to fraud charges for his role in a scheme to empty brokerage accounts by installing malicious Trojan horse software on victims' computers.

According to court documents, Alexey Mineev set up several "drop accounts" that were then wired funds stolen from banking and brokerage accounts between July and December 2007. He pleaded guilty to one count of money laundering on Wednesday, according to Mike Ruocco, deputy to Judge Paul Gardephe of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, who is presiding in the case.

The criminals would infect PCs with malicious Trojan software that would steal account numbers and passwords whenever victims logged into their accounts online.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

Movie directors, composers, authors, legal experts, policy-makers and others are meeting in Washinton this week to discuss the "threats and opportunities" the Internet poses to copyright in the digital age.

Some 500 delegates from more than 55 countries are scheduled to attend the 2nd World Copyright Summit being held on Tuesday and Wednesday at the Ronald Reagan Convention Center. Web and software giants Google and Microsoft and representatives of movie, music and book rights societies are also among those attending the summit organized by the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC), whose president is Bee Gees brother Robin Gibb.

Organizer CISAC, listing the "key issues" for the summit, cited "How the digital media environment is providing common threats and opportunities to all creative repertoires."

French Culture Minister Christine Albanel, Hollywood director Milos Forman and US Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, are among the nearly 100 speakers slated to address the gathering. Looming over the summit is the threat posed to artists by digital piracy.

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP

British YouTube users are amongst the most sensitive in the world, executives at the site have claimed. Amid demands for an independent regulator to police its content they said Britons are amongst the most likely to object to footage hosted on the site.

The company has reacted by introducing special “Britain-only” policies following a raft of complaints from users over gang-related videos. Victoria Grand, head of policy at YouTube, told The Times: “The UK is a big flagging country. We get a lot of videos flagged up in the UK because of issues that British people are concerned about which maybe aren’t an issue in the US, such as the brandishing of guns.”

 

(Source: TimesOnline)

Full story

TimesOnline

As many as 40,000 Web sites have been hacked to redirect unwitting victims to another Web site that tries to infect PCs with malicious software, according to security vendor Websense.

The affected sites have been hacked to host JavaScript code that directs people to a fake Google Analytics Web site, which provides data for Web site owners on a site's usage, then to another bad site, said Carl Leonard, threat research manager for Websense.

Those Web sites have likely been hacked via a SQL injection attack, in which improperly configured Web applications accept malicious data and get hacked, Leonard said.

 

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld website

Spending more time on social networks and blogs? With the latest figures showing the number of minutes spent on social networking sites in the United States has almost doubled over the past year.

Nielsen Online, which measures web traffic, said the number of minutes on social networks in the United States rose 83 percent in April from the same month a year ago, but found users were quick to move on and sites could quickly fall from favor.

The total number of minutes spent on Facebook surged 700 percent year-on-year to 13.9 billion in April this year from 1.7 billion a year ago, making it the No. 1 social networking site for the fourth consecutive month. News Corp's MySpace was second most popular but the number of minutes spent on this site fell 31 percent to 4.97 billion from 7.3 billion a year ago, although it remained the top social networking site when ranked by video streams.

 

(Source: Reuters)

Full story

Reuters website

Accessing your bank account using your mobile phone might seem safe, but security experts say would-be hackers can access confidential information via a simple text message seemingly from your service provider.

People in the industry aware of the risk see it as extremely small, as only a few people use handsets to access their bank accounts, but it is growing as mobile Internet usage rises.

 

(Source: Reuters)

Full story

Reuters website

President Barack Obama is calling digital security a top priority, whether it's guarding the computer systems that keep the lights on in the city and direct airliners to the right runway or those protecting customers who pay their bills online.

Obama is expected to lay out broad goals for dealing with cyber threats while depicting the U.S. as a digital nation that needs to provide the education required to keep pace with technology and attract and retain a cyber-savvy work force. He also is expected to call for a new education campaign to raise public awareness of the challenges and threats related to cyber security.

 

(Source: AP)

Full story

AP website

ID theft victims are much more likely to get hit with fraudulent charges on their credit cards or debit cards, according to a new study from the Identity Theft Resource Center that tracks the effects of ID theft.

While repairing the damage from ID theft involves some cost for things like police reports, photocopying, travel, etc., ranging from an average of $739 for dealing with damage done to an existing account to $951 to fix the aftermath of a fraudulently opened new account, the real pain comes from the time spent dealing with the mess. It took 58 hours on average to deal with ID theft involving existing accounts, and a painful 165 hours for new accounts, the study found.

 

(Source: PCWorld)

Full story

PCWorld website

Spammers seem to be working a little bit harder these days, according to Symantec, which reported Tuesday that unsolicited e-mail made up 90.4 percent of messages on corporate networks last month. That represents a 5.1 percent increase over last month's numbers, but it's nothing out of the ordinary. For years, spam has made up somewhere between 80 percent and 95 percent of all e-mail on the Internet.

Symantec reported that nearly 58 percent of spam is now coming from so-called botnets --networks of hacked computers that can be misused by criminals to steal financial information, launch attacks or send spam. The worst of the spamming botnets -- called Donbot -- generates 18.2 percent of all spam, according to Symantec.

These botnet computers can be rented out on the black market by anybody, but in recent months some spammers have been moving away from botnets, experimenting with a new way to sneak their unwanted e-mail past corporate filters, according to Adam O'Donnell, a researcher with antispam vendor Cloudmark.

 

(Source: PCWorld)

Full story

PCWorld website

As part of this year’s focus on education, the UN Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technology and Development (GAID) presented the newly formed University of the People, a non-profit institution offering higher education to the masses.

For hundreds of millions of people around the world higher education is no more than a dream, Shai Reshef, the founder of the University of the People, told reporters. They are constrained by finances, the lack of institutions in their region, or they are not able to leave home to study at a university for personal reasons. Mr Reshef said that this University opened the gate to these people to continue their studies from home and at minimal cost by using open-source technology, open course materials, e-learning methods and peer-to-peer teaching. Admission opened just over two weeks ago; and without any promotion some 200 students from 52 countries have already registered, with a high school diploma and a sufficient level of English as entry requirements. Students will be placed in classes of 20, after which they can log on to a weekly lecture, discuss its themes with their peers and take a test - all online. There are voluntary professors, post-graduate students and students in other classes who can also offer advice and consultation.

Source: United Nations

Full Report

Experts on information and communication technology (ICT) from the United Nations, private industry, non-governmental organizations and government agencies have met in Geneva to look at ways to use the latest digital innovations to fight poverty and improve public health.

“The objective is to introduce cutting-edge, innovative knowledge, experiences, expertise and best practices” to the work of the UN, and the UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development in particular, according to the UN Global Alliance for ICT and Development (GAID), which organized the one-day meeting. “New technologies can boost education through distance learning, content creation and delivery, and teacher training,” GAID noted in a news release. “They can help create new job opportunities for people living in poverty. These technologies can also empower women and the disadvantaged to increase their access to information and participate in the economy.”

The Alliance also noted that advances in health information systems based on ICT are improving patients care and healthcare providers’ productivity worldwide. However, developing countries lag behind in employing ICT to these ends. “While diseases in developing countries account for over 90 per cent of the global disease burden, it is estimated that only 10 per cent of the more than $100 billion spent annually on health research is allocated for health problems prevalent in these countries,” it stated.

Source: UNESCO

Full Report

With US government and private computer networks facing increasing attack, the White House announced that President Barack Obama would unveil a report on US cyber security on Friday.

"The report is an important first step towards securing our nation's cyber infrastructure," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters. "The administration recognizes the very serious threats public- and private-sector networks face from cyber crime and cyber attack," he said.

"Recognizing these threats, the president has elevated cyber security to a major administration priority," Gibbs added.

 

(Source: AFP)

Full story

AFP website

 

The American Academy of Pediatrics has released a report showing that there are some significant factors which increase the likelihood of online sexual abuse of girls. The researchers suggest that 'girls are more likely to experience online sexual advances or have offline encounters if they have previously been abused or have a provocative avatar'.

Sites such as Facebook and MySpace allow individuals to describe themselves as well as post photographs and the type of photographs and accompanying texts give individuals their online identity and directly affects online behaviour and interaction.

The authors suggest that....."self-presentations can change the way Internet users interact in a manner that increases the risk for online sexual advances.."

(Source: CNN)

Full story

CNN website

A new Vatican website, www.pope2you.net, has gone live, offering an application called "The pope meets you on Facebook", and another allowing the faithful to see the Pope's speeches and messages on their iPhones or iPods.

The Vatican's World Communications Day this Sunday is devoted to communicating the gospel with new technologies. "We recognise that a church that does not communicate ceases to be a church," said Monsignor Paul Tighe, secretary of the Vatican's Social Communications department. "Many young people today are not turning to traditional media like newspapers and magazines any more for information and entertainment. "They are looking to a different media culture, and this is our effort to ensure that the Church is present in that communications culture."

Users of the new site can select from more than a dozen "virtual postcards" with pictures of the pope and messages from him on faith, love and life specifically aimed at young people, and send them to other users.

 

(Source : Reuters)

Full story

Reuters website

 

California has petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate a law to keep violent video games out of the hands of anyone under 18. A U.S. Court of Appeals revoked the law in February. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger urged the court to let parents decide. But the Entertainment Software Association called the petition a "complete waste" of time.  

The law was passed by California legislators in 2005 but was blocked by the video-game industry. Brown and Schwarzenegger compared the ban on violent games to banning pornography.

"I signed this important measure to ensure parents are involved in determining which video games are appropriate for their children," Schwarzenegger said. "By prohibiting the sale of violent video games to children under the age of 18 and requiring these games to be clearly labeled, this law would allow parents to make better informed decisions for their kids."

 

(Source : NewsFactor)

Full story

NewsFactor website

 

Video-sharing website YouTube has removed hundreds of pornographic videos which were uploaded in what is believed to be a planned attack.

The material was uploaded under names of famous teenage celebrities such as Hannah Montana and Jonas Brothers. Many started with footage of children's videos before groups of adults performing graphic sex acts appeared on screen. YouTube owner Google said it was aware and addressing the problem.

Under other uploaded videos, online users posted comments such as: "Take the tags off, you'll get us caught." Another said: "Your gonna kill us all!" As the disturbing videos were being uploaded, many viewers added them to their favourites and rated them highly.

 

(Source : BBC)

Full story

BBC website

Identity thieves that hit Facebook last week with a new round of phishing attacks are harvesting passwords for profit.

The newest Facebook attacks resemble previous phishing rounds in their tactics: A compromised account sends a malicious link to friends. That link leads to a site that mimics the legitimate log-in page. But users duped into entering their usernames and passwords are likely giving away more than just their Facebook credentials.

"It's not surprising that they're targeting Facebook," said Kevin Haley, a director on Symantec's security response team. "Facebook has, what, 200 million-plus users? The bad guys always go where's there's a lot of people."

 

(Source : PCWorld)

Full story

PCWorld website

Militants and hate groups increasingly use social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube as propaganda tools to recruit new members, according to a report by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

The report was based on "over 10,000 problematic Web sites, social networking groups, portals, blogs, chat rooms, videos and hate games on the Internet which promote racial violence, anti-semitism, homophobia, hate music and terrorism."

Examples of what the report calls "digital terrorism and hate" range from a Facebook group named "Death to gays" in Croatian to a YouTube video of a Koran being burned and various Web sites promoting militant groups such as Hezbollah, the Taliban, al Qaeda and Colombia's FARC.

 

(Source : REUTERS)

Full story

REUTERS website

Researchers from Cambridge University have found that many photos were still accessible on a number of social networking sites  including Facebook, even after having been deleted.

The researchers reported that Flickr and Google's Picasa performed better, while Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces removed the photos immediately.

A Facebook spokesperson stated: "When a user deletes a photograph from Facebook it is removed from our servers immediately. However, URLs to photographs may continue to exist on the Content Delivery Network (CDN) after users delete them from their Facebook, until they are overwritten. overwriting usually happens after a short period of time".

 

(Source: BBC)

Full story

BBC website

New York State Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo's office reports that a group of 7 individuals operated a 24hour prostitution service called 'Room Service Entertainment' from Craigslist's erotic services section.

Cuomo's office added that Craigslist was the "sole vehicle through which the company operated". The advertisements listed included either a pornographic or semipornographic photograph with a phone number "to arrange a date". If found guilty of enterprise corruption, the group of 7 could all face up to 25 years in prison.

In a written statement, Andrew Cuomo stated, "Until Craigslist gets serious about putting real protections in place, it will continue to be an environment where criminal operations thrive with impunity".

 

(Source: CNN)

Full story

CNN website

The sentencing of a Lori Drew, convicted of three misdemeanours counts of accessing protected computers without authorisation to obtain information to cause emotional damage to Megan Meier.

Mrs Drew was accused of fraudently using the MySpace site to pose as a teenage boy who pretended to be interested in Megan Meier. Tragically Meier committed suicide after the "boy" made disparaging remarks about her online.

Source: CNN

Full story

CNN website

Recent sexting (the sending of naked or partially clothed photos of an individual to others via mobile phones) cases in the USA have led to concern about whether such online behaviour should be classified as a criminial offence or simply a 'misdemeanour'.

Such cases have resulted in police arrests of several adolescents and criminal charges of child pornography.

Sending or distributing explicit images of child under 18 is illegal in many countries.

Parents are being encouraged to warn their children about the possible consequences of sexting (for both the sender and receiver).

A recent National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancies survey of more than 1000 teenagers in the USA, found that one-fifth of 13-19 year olds had actually sent compromising images of themselves via text or online. A third of boys and a quarter of girls reported that they had had nude or semi nude images, originally meant to be private, shared with them.

Speaking to the BBC, WiredSafety founder, Parry Aftab stated, "It is dangerous behaviour that we don't want children to be encouraged to do.....Not only could these images end up in the hands of paedophile groups and place kids at higher risk of being targeted, but they could also be subject to extortion by those who have ended up with the images".

 

(Source: BBC)

Full story

BBC Website

Craigslist, a centralised network of online communities featuring  online classified ads, may face criminal action in South Carolina if it fails to delete ads which 'promote prostitution and pornography'. Attorney General Henry McMaster, sent a communication to Craigslist CEO, Jim Buckmaster asking him to remove such items listed  under "erotic services" and "casual encounters" in the South Carolina section.

Sherriff's deputies in Richland County, South Carolina, have made up to 121 prostitution-related arrests from Craigslist ads, claims attorney general spokesman Mark Plowden.

(Source: CNN)

Full story

CNN website

In the USA, Democratic congresswoman for California, Linda Sanchez, is leading a bill aimed at combatting cyberbullying. However, opponents argue that such a bill silences free speech.

The bill itself, states that any electronic communication (to include emails, blogs, instant messaging and texts) sent to "...coerce, intimidate, harass or cause substantial emotional distress" could result in a fine or a two year prison sentence.

Those who oppose the bill are concerned about honouring fthe reedom of expression as set out in the US constitution's first amendment. The bill is named after Megan Meier, a Missouri teenager who committed suicide after being the victim of cyberbullying on MySpace.

In the UK, the secretary of state for children, schools and families, Ed Balls, refers to such online abuse as "insidious".

(Source:Guardian)

Full story

Guardian website

An American girl chatting on Facebook with a British teenage boy alerted her mother after he admitted that he planned to commit suicide. Without having his address, the girl's mother contacted local police which then led to a series of calls to the White House, the British Embassy in Washington and finally the police in the UK town where the boy was found alive.

(Source: BBC News)

Full Story

BBC Website

The ITU Regional Cybersecurity Forum for Africa and Arab States, dedicated to “Connecting the World Responsibly”, aims to identify some of the main challenges faced by countries in Africa and Arab States in enhancing cybersecurity and securing critical information infrastructures.

It will consider best practices, information sharing mechanisms and concrete actions for cybersecurity development, taking into consideration the key principles of matching the borderless, transnational nature of cyber-threats with meeting specific national and regional requirements. The Forum will consider initiatives at the regional and international levels to increase cooperation and coordination amongst different stakeholders. The forum programme will include interactive sessions on the projects and related tools that ITU is working on to assist Member States in developing and implementing cybersecurity capabilities.

Capacity building activities will be undertaken in the following main areas:

Development of a legal framework;

Development of watch and warning and incident management capabilities, including the establishment of a national computer incident response team (CIRT); and,

Actions to be considered when developing a national cybersecurity strategy and harmonization within the key principles of international cooperation.

The event is expected to bring together government representatives, industry actors, and other stakeholder groups from countries on the African continent and the Arab States to discuss, share information, and collaborate on the elaboration and implementation of national policy, regulatory and enforcement frameworks for cybersecurity. It will benefit information and communication policy makers from ministries and government departments; institutions and departments dealing with cybersecurity policies, legislation and enforcement; and representatives from operators, manufacturers, service providers, industry and consumer associations involved in promoting a culture of cybersecurity.

The forum will be conducted in English, Arabic and French with simultaneous interpretation. Participation in the Forum is open to all ITU Member States, Sector Members, Associates, and other interested stakeholders, including representatives from regional and international organizations.

More detailed information about the event (including the draft forum agenda, online pre-registration, fellowship requests (for eligible LDCs) can be found on the ITU Regional Cybersecurity Forum for Africa and Arab States website at www.itu.int/ITU-D/cyb/events/2009/tunis/.

Register for the ITU Regional Cybersecurity Forum for Africa and Arab States here.

We look forward to seeing you at the event!

Following earlier reports of users not being able to delete their personal information, Facebook has now allowed voters to decide on the best way to proceed. In reviewing their policies with users, the popular social networking site has agreed to allow its users greater control of their personal data.

After a vote, 75% of responders were in favour of these proposed changes, which will allow users to own their own information and also have the right to remove it if they so choose.

Founder, Mark Zuckerberg explained that the networking site was aiming for a more "...transparent and democratic approach"

(Source: Telegraph)

Full story

Telegraph website

Miguel Angel Mancera, the Attorney General of Mexico City, stated that seven suspects including a Roman Catholic priest, were accused of distributing over 100,000 child sex abuse images (including pictures and videos) of children worldwide. Among the material taken away by law enforcement were CDs, DVDs and computers.

(Source: CNN)

Full story

CNN website

 

Chris De Wolfe, MySpace co-founder is reported by the Telegraph to be stepping down as chief executive.

In 2008, Facebook was reported to be the number one social networking site, relegating MySpace, (with 130 million users globally), to second place.

As well as tough competition from Facebook, a more recent social networking site, Twitter, appears to be holding its own against MySpace.

(Source:Telegraph)

Full story

Telegraph website

ITU is pleased to announce the launch of its 2009 Cybersecurity and ICT Applications Essay Competition.

The 2009 ITU Cybersecurity and ICT Applications Essay Competition is open to current students and recent graduates in economics, political science, law, literature, telecommunications, computer science, information systems and related fields between the ages of 20 and 30 years old. The winners of the 2009 Essay Competition will be offered the opportunity of a consultancy contract within the ITU Development Sector's ICT Applications and Cybersecurity Division for three months. The winners will be given a contribution towards the cost of an economy class flight from their place of residence. In addition, they will be paid the sum of CHF 6000 towards living expenses for the duration of the contract.

To enter the competition you need to submit an essay on one of the following essay topics:

• Mobiles for Development: Enabling Low-Cost e-Applications for Rural and Remote Areas (e-Health, e-Government, e-Environment)
• Protecting Children and Youth in the Internet and Mobile Age: Innovative Technical and Social Solutions
• Connecting the World Responsibly: Empowering Women and Girls Through Creative Uses of ICTs
• Personal Information Online (internet/mobiles): Responding to User Safety Concerns

All applications should be submitted online through the competition website.

The deadline for applications is 14 June 2009.

We look forward to reviewing your applications and wish you the best of luck in the competition!

 

In the USA, the North Carolina Attorney General, Roy Cooper, summoned MySpace to provide the identities of these registered sex offenders to law enforcement.

Commenting on the responsibility of social networks, Cooper added that, "...MySpace, Facebook and other social networks need to do much more to protect kids online".

North Carolina state passed a law in 2008 banning sex offenders from registering on networks involving children and young people.

(Source:CNN)

Full Story

CNN Website

 

 

A new report from ITU, highlights some harsh realities for the global ICT industry. The report, Confronting the Crisis: Its Impact on the ICT Industry, considers how the industry can position itself for recovery in the future.

Confronting the Crisis: Its Impact on the ICT Industry draws on analysis from leading industry experts and international institutions. As the established order is overturned, it says, convergence in the ICT industry will accelerate, with the emergence of new players with new business models. Firms’ ability to weather the economic storm will depend on their ability to invest for the future and explore new opportunities to benefit from the eventual upturn. For an industry founded on innovation, the current turmoil will create openings for nascent ICT companies.

Confronting the Crisis finds that although credit is now less abundant and more expensive, with financing costs for operators on average 3 − 4 per cent higher year-on-year, savvy operators can take advantage of the economic turmoil to reposition their services for the upturn. Funding is still available for players with sound business models, established demand and early projected cash flows. Alternative sources of financing are now needed, with a growing role for government financing and economic stimulus packages.

Many analysts contributing to Confronting the Crisis underlined the need for ICT as vital services and suggested that fixed-mobile substitution and consumers’ decision to switch to mobile telephony may gain momentum in developed markets during a prolonged recession. The report also notes that long project lead times for the satellite industry mean that it has been less affected in the short term, with strong recent growth in demand from developing countries. The financial difficulties facing the private sector could add to pressure for government intervention in the financing of national backbone infrastructure. Governments are already stepping in to diminish the impact on the transition to next-generation networks (NGN), which can carry voice, data and media services simultaneously. Several administrations have announced commitments to invest in their national backbone infrastructure, while others, such as the European Union, have included the roll-out of broadband networks in their economic stimulus packages. Although the financial crisis may delay investment in NGN, it has also led to a widespread reaffirmation of the importance of building advanced telecommunication infrastructure as part of an economic stimulus package.

See the full press release from 16 February 2009.
The report is available for download here.

Press release issued simultaneously by ITU and European Commission.

Geneva, 10 February 2009 — ITU and the European Commission have joined forces to mark Safer Internet Day. This year, the focus is on protecting children online.

Children are among the most active — and most vulnerable — participants online. According to recent surveys, over 60 per cent of children and teenagers talk in chat rooms on a daily basis. Three in four children online are willing to share personal information about themselves and their family in exchange for goods and services. One in five children will be targeted by a predator or paedophile each year. Protecting children in cyberspace is, therefore, clearly our duty.

"Children are very resourceful in making the most of online services such as social networking sites and mobile phones," said Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Information Society and Media. "But many still underestimate the hidden risks of using these, from cyber-bullying to sexual grooming online. Today, I call upon all decision-makers, from both the public and the private sector, to listen and learn from children and to improve awareness strategies and tools to protect minors." Ms Reding added: "The Internet binds the whole world together. The safety of children who use it is a concern for everyone. I am therefore very happy that ITU is associated with us in doing this, today on Safer Internet Day, and all year round."

"Child online safety must be on the global agenda," said ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré. "We must ensure that everyone is aware of the dangers for children online. And we want to promote and strengthen the many outstanding efforts that are being made around the world, such as the Safer Internet Programme, to limit these dangers." This year, the 6th edition of Safer Internet Day includes more than 500 events in 50 countries worldwide. ITU and the European Commission will collaborate on this and future events, such as World Telecommunication and Information Society Day, 17 May 2009, which is dedicated to "Protecting Children in Cyberspace". The European Commission’s Directorate General for Information Society and Media has declared its full support for ITU’s Child Online Protection (COP) Initiative. The EC’s Ins@fe Network will launch a Safer Internet Day virtual exhibition which will host pavilions where visitors can learn more about initiatives undertaken by the 50 participating countries. ITU will host an online pavilion in support of EC’s efforts to raise awareness among youngsters aged 12 to 17 regarding the risks they may face online.

ITU and Child Online Protection (COP)

ITU’s motto is "committed to connecting the world", but we are also committed to connecting the world responsibly. That means working together to ensure cybersecurity, enable cyberpeace, and — more importantly — protect children online. While child online protection programmes exist in many developed countries, there are very few in the developing world today — and very little coordination between them. ITU established the Global Cybersecurity Agenda (GCA) and launched the Child Online Protection (COP) initiative. COP aims to bring together partners from all sectors of the global community to ensure a safe and secure online experience for children everywhere.

See the press release here.

In an article in the Wall Street Journal, Emily Steel looks at who should bear the responsibility for protecting children online following the release of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force report on child esafety.

Attorney General Roy Cooper of North Carolina is reported as saying, "Clearly the main responsibility is on parents."  adding, "..because technology companies are providing the gathering space and encouraging children to come, they have a duty to put in place technologies that can help protect kids".

Acknowledging efforts by social networking sites such as MySpace to respond to reports of abuse within 24 hours, as well as blocking child predators from their network.

(Source: Wall Street Journal)

Read article here

Wall Street Journal

ITU launched a new initiative today to safeguard children, the most vulnerable users of the Internet. Addressing ITU’s high-level meeting on cybersecurity by video message, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, "We have to protect against cyberthreats, especially when they target children. I welcome the ITU’s Child Online Protection (COP) initiative and urge all States to support it."

The Child Online Protection initiative brings together partners from all sectors of the international community with the aim of creating a safe and secure online experience for children everywhere. While the virtual world offers unlimited opportunities in many respects, it is also the hunting ground for cybercriminals and paedophiles. Recognizing that a concerted global effort would be required to ensure that the cyberworld becomes a safe place for young people to work, learn and play, ITU is working with other UN agencies, including UNICEF, UNICRI and UNIDIR.

Building confidence and security At the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in 2005, ITU was entrusted by leaders of the international community with Action Point C5: "building confidence and security in the use of ICTs". As an intergovernmental organization with a network of 191 Member States and more than 700 Sector Members and Associates, ITU was a logical choice. In 2007, in answer to this responsibility, Dr Hamadoun Touré, ITU Secretary-General, launched the Global Cybersecurity Agenda (GCA), an international framework that addresses 5 main aspects: legal measures technical and procedural measures organizational structure capacity building international cooperation The WSIS outcomes also specifically recognized the needs of children and young people and their protection in cyberspace.

The Tunis Commitment recognized "the role of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the protection of children and in enhancing the development of children" and the need to "strengthen action to protect children from abuse and defend their rights in the context of ICT". The COP initiative is in line with ITU’s mandate to establish the foundation for a safe and secure cyberworld for future generations. The need for COP is clear. A decade ago, there were just 182 million people using the Internet globally — and almost all of them lived in the developed world. By the end of 2008, however, there will be over 1.5 billion Internet users worldwide, and more than 400 million of them will have broadband access — vastly increasing the dangers online, especially for children. With over 600 million users in Asia, 130 million in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 50 million in Africa, the Internet is a growing common resource. 

"ITU is the lead UN agency on ICT for Development," said Mr Sami Al-Basheer, Director of the ITU Telecommunication Development Bureau (BDT). "In working towards an all-inclusive information society we must ensure that children everywhere can enjoy the benefits of ICTs while being protected from the risks posed by inappropriate use."

Read the full press release for the COP initiative here.

The Federal Trade Commission has approved four new rule provisions under the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 (CAN-SPAM), which aim to clarify the Act’s requirements.

The new rule provisions address four topics: (1) an e-mail recipient cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her e-mail address and opt-out preferences, or take any steps other than sending a reply e-mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page to opt out of receiving future e-mail from a sender; (2) the definition of “sender” was modified to make it easier to determine which of multiple parties advertising in a single e-mail message is responsible for complying with the Act’s opt-out requirements; (3) a “sender” of commercial e-mail can include an accurately-registered post office box or private mailbox established under United States Postal Service regulations to satisfy the Act’s requirement that a commercial e-mail display a “valid physical postal address”; and (4) a definition of the term “person” was added to clarify that CAN-SPAM’s obligations are not limited to natural persons.

Continue reading the news release here.

A presentation by Martin J. Levy of Tier1 Research and Josh Snowhorn of Terremark on Datacenter Power Trends - NANOG 42 Power Panel at the NANOG 42 meeting discusses colocation centre problems, how these came about, what is expected to happen, and how colo is considered the bottleneck of the Internet. As cited from the Gartner Research in 2006, "some organizations are in the unenviable position of paying more to power and cool a rack a servers than they paid for the rack and the servers themselves. Clearly things are moving out of balance." Case studies and possible solutions to these datacenter problems are also included in the presentation.

Read the full presentation here.
More on the NANOG 42 meeting here.

Reuters recently reports on cyber warfare, from the Cold War Soviet oil pipeline explosion to the current information security situation. "The pipeline explosion was probably the first major salvo in what has since become known as cyber warfare. The incident has been cropping up in increasingly urgent discussions in the U.S. on how to cope with attacks on military and civilian computer networks and control systems - and how and when to strike back. Air traffic control, power plants, Wall Street trading systems, banks, traffic lights and emergency responder communications could all be targets of attacks that could bring the U.S. to its knees."

According to Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell's testimony to a Senate committee, "[the US] information infrastructure - including the Internet, telecommunications networks, computer systems and embedded processors and controllers in critical industries - increasingly is being targeted... by a growing array of state and non-state adversaries." The Pentagon adds that it detects three million attempts to infiltrate its computer networks every day. On a report of the US Government Accountability Office, an audit of 24 government agencies, including Defense and Homeland Security, had shown that "poor information security is a widespread problem with potentially devastating consequences" pertaining to the inevitable involvement of civilians with private companies owning more than 80 percent of the infrastructure.

"Unlike traditional defense categories (i.e. land, sea and air), the military capabilities required to respond to an attack on U.S. infrastructure will necessarily involve infrastructure owned and operated by the private sector," according to Jody R. Westby, CEO of Global Cyber Risk and a champion of better public-private coordination to cope with cyber attacks.

The article further discusses the importance of public-private coordination and the power of botnets in this warfare. A scenario of the damage extent and how the cyber warfare may unfold was also drawn from an interview with Westby.

Read the full article here.

On 11 March 2008, the Initiative for the Regional Integration of South American Infrastructure (IIRSA) and the Inter-American Communications Commission (CITEL) jointly organized at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) headquarters a workshop on International Roaming Services for Mobile Telecommunications, the first component of an IDB Technical Cooperation to support the project known as Implementation of a Roaming Agreement in South America, included in IIRSA’s Implementation Agenda Based on Consensus. Following this event was the XII meeting of the Permanent Consultative Committee on Telecommunications I (PCC.I) of CITEL, held at the IDB’s headquarters, in Washington D.C., from 12 through 14 March 2008, during which telecommunication-related topics deemed important for the region were discussed, such as the coordination of standards for telecommunication networks and services, convergence, analysis of cybersecurity issues and critical infrastructure and the use of telecommunications in emergencies, among others.

A presentation on the Overview of ITU-D Activities Related to Cybersecurity and Critical Information Infrastructure Protection was given by Robert Shaw, head of the ICT Applications and Cybersecurity division, during the CITEL meeting, providing background information on ITU, cybersecurity, related ITU key activities underway, and an outline of the Framework for Organizing a National Approach to Cybersecurity. Specific cybersecurity-related activities and initiatives as well as a case study on botnets were also presented. 

Another presentation on Management Framework for Organizing National Cybersecurity/CIIP Efforts was given by Joe Richardson, further discussing the ITU Framework for Organizing National Cybersecurity/CIIP Efforts and the ITU National Cybersecurity/CIIP Self-Assessment Toolkit.

For more information on CYB's activities involving cybersecurity, visit the division website.

Nnamdi Chizuba Anisiobi, age 31, of Nigeria; Anthony Friday Ehis, age 34, of Senegal; and Kesandu Egwuonwu, age 35, of Nigeria have pleaded guilty to charges related to spam e-mail that promised U.S. victims millions of dollars from an estate and a lottery, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Wednesday. The three were arrested in Amsterdam on Feb, 21, 2006. One of the case scenarios was an e-mail sent by the defendants to thousands of potential victims purporting to be from an individual suffering from terminal throat cancer who needed assistance distributing approximately US$55 million to charity. According to the DOJ, the fraud victims lost $1.2 million by giving the defendants advance fees. "Anisiobi pled guilty to one count of conspiracy, eight counts of wire fraud and one count of mail fraud. Ehis pled guilty to one count of conspiracy and five counts of wire fraud. Egwuonwu pled guilty to one count of conspiracy, three counts of wire fraud and one count of mail fraud. The maximum penalty for mail and wire fraud is 20 years in prison. The conspiracy charge carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison." A fourth defendant, Lenn Nwokeafor, was also reported to have fled to Nigeria. He was subsequently arrested by the Nigerian Economic & Financial Crimes Commission on July 27, 2006, and is now being held by the Nigerian authorities pending extradition to the U.S..

Read the full article on The New York Times.

The Wall Street Journal recently reports on President Bush's move to improve protection against cyberattacks. Despite promising a frugal budget proposal next month, an estimated $6 billion has been allocated to build a secretive system protecting U.S. communication networks from attacks by terrorists, spies and hackers. "Administration officials and lawmakers say that the prospect of cyberterrorists hacking into a nuclear-power plant or paralyzing Wall Street is becoming possible, and that the U.S. isn't prepared. This is 'one area where we have significant work to do,' Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said in a recent interview."

Read the full article on the Wall Street Journal.

Speech recognition technology has been an accelerating technological development and is now making its way to the mass market. Among these companies providing speech recognition technology is Vlingo Corporation. "Vlingo’s service lets people talk naturally, rather than making them use a limited number of set phrases. Dave Grannan, the company’s chief executive, demonstrated the Vlingo Find application by asking his phone for a song by Mississippi John Hurt (try typing that with your thumbs), for the location of a local bakery and for a Web search for a consumer product. It was all fast and efficient. Vlingo is designed to adapt to the voice of its primary user, but I was also able to use Mr. Grannan’s phone to find an address. The Find application is in the beta test phase at AT&T and Sprint." Other companies offering speech recognition technology to their customers include Nuance with its Nuance Voice Control system recently released last August, and Microsoft with its purchase of TellMe Networks last March. According to Opus Research, speech recognition has reached a $1.6 billion market in 2007, and they further predict an annual growth rate of 14.5 percent over the next three years. "Dan Miller, an analyst at Opus, said that companies that have licensed speech recognition technology would probably see faster revenue growth, as more consumers used the technology."

Speech recognition technology has also been available on personal computers since 2001 in applications like Microsoft Office but with a weaker following. It is also already used in high-end G.P.S. systems and luxury cars from Cadillac and Lexus, and is now spreading to less expensive systems and cars. The speech technology chief at I.B.M. Research, David Nahamoo, adds that the company has an automotive customer testing speech recognition to help drivers find songs quickly while driving. SimulScribe, on the other hand, uses speech recognition to convert voice mail into e-mail.

More on this article on the The New York Times.

E360 Insight, LLC filed a complaint against Comcast Corporation on 15 January 2008 accusing the latter of unfairly blocking e360’s e-mail from reaching subscribers. According to e360, in one typical instance, e360 received an error message stating that it’s e-mail was blocked from reaching subscribers because Comcast’s filters determined that e-mail from e360’s servers had been "sent in patterns which are characteristic of spam." According to Direct magazine's report, "the complaint claims that Comcast’s alleged interference with e360’s business relationships cost the firm $4.5 million a year from 2005 through 2007. The complaint also accuses Comcast of sending e360 bogus bounce information, causing the marketer to remove e-mail addresses from its file that were still active. The suit claims the false bounce information cost it almost $2.5 million." E360 asks for more than $12 million in compensatory damages and $9 million in punitive damages from the accused.

Read the full complaint here.

FCW.com reports that "foreign hackers, primarily from Russia and China, are increasingly seeking to steal Americans’ health care records, according to a Department of Homeland Security analyst." Two cases of intrusions to the health care systems' servers have been recorded in the past year which alarmed security officials. In early 2007, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Web site was infected with a virus, and in April, a Military Health System server holding Tricare records was hacked. Mark Walker, who works in DHS’ Critical Infrastructure Protection Division, said the hackers are seeking to exfiltrate health care data probably for espionage. DHS is increasing its analysis staff to monitor threats in several industries, including health care, and will be issuing more alerts about cyberthreats to health care data, he said. He added further that DHS wants to build a database of health information system intrusions so it can better analyze the threats and develop countermeasures.

More on this report here.

The CSI Survey 2007, the 12th of its kind, by the Computer Security Institute, aims to raise the level of security awareness, as well as help determine the scope of computer crime in the United States. The survey strongly suggests in this year’s results that mounting threats are beginning to materialize as mounting losses. The survey results are based on the responses of 494 computer security practitioners in U.S. corporations, government agencies, financial institutions, medical institutions and universities.

Among the key findings from this year’s survey are:

• The average annual loss reported in this year’s survey shot up to $350,424 from $168,000 the previous year. Not since the 2004 report have average losses been this high.
• Almost one-fifth (18 percent) of those respondents who suffered one or more kinds of security incident further said they’d suffered a “targeted attack,” defined as a malware attack aimed exclusively at their organization or at organizations within a small subset of the general population.
• Financial fraud overtook virus attacks as the source of the greatest financial losses. Virus losses, which had been the leading cause of loss for seven straight years, fell to second place. If separate categories concerned with the loss of customer and proprietary data are lumped together, however, then that combined category would be the second-worst cause of financial loss. Another significant cause of loss was system penetration by outsiders.
• Insider abuse of network access or e-mail (such as trafficking in pornography or pirated software) edged out virus incidents as the most prevalent security problem, with 59 and 52 percent of respondents reporting each respectively.
• When asked generally whether they’d suffered a security incident, 46 percent of respondents said yes, down from 53 percent last year and 56 percent the year before.
• The percentage of organizations reporting computer intrusions to law enforcement continued upward after reversing a multi-year decline over the past two years, standing now at 29 percent as compared to 25 percent in last year’s report.

For the complete detailed survey results, click here.

The U.S. Center for Information Technology Leadership (CITL) conducted a study on The Value of Provider-to-Provider Telehealth Technologies. Assuming some specific healthcare settings such as emergency departments, correctional institutions, nursing homes and physician offices the cost-benefit analysis focused on three technology systems, i.e. store-and-forward, real-time video, and a hybrid model combining the first two.

The CITL study found that benefits outweighed costs for all three systems, but the research organization recommends the hybrid model as the most cost-effective one for the U.S. The report is available at citl.org.

John Kenneth Schiefer, a 26-year-old computer security consultant from Los Angeles has admitted to hacking into computers entrusted to him to create a botnet of as many as 250,000 PCs, which he used to steal money from and identities of unsuspecting consumers and corporations. "Schiefer agreed to plead guilty to four felony charges in connection with the case and faces up to 60 years in prison and a $1.75-million fine, according to court documents filed Friday in federal court in Los Angeles." According to Assistant U.S. Atty. Mark Krause in Los Angeles, Schiefer is the first person to be accused under federal wiretapping law of operating a botnet.

Schiefer stole user names and passwords for EBay Inc.'s PayPal online payment service to make unauthorized purchases and passed the stolen account information on to others. According to the plea agreement, a conspirator named "Adam" who is allegedly a minor was involved in Scheifer's scam. Scheifer and his accomplices were reported to have used illicit software which they planted on people's PCs to spirit account information from a storage area in Windows-based computers. A Dutch Internet advertising company also hired his services to install its programs on people's computers when they consented, but he installed it on more than 150,000 PCs without permission, earning more than $19,000 in commissions.

The federal investigation began in 2005, and the indictment includes "four counts of accessing protected computers to commit fraud, disclosing illegally intercepted electronic communications, wire fraud and bank fraud." Schiefer's initial appearance in Los Angeles will on Nov. 28 and his arraignment on Dec. 3. There is a similar case in May 2006 involving a Downey man, Jeanson James Ancheta who was sentenced to almost five years in federal prison after pleading guilty to four felony charges for using botnets to spread spyware and send spam.

To read the full article, visit the Los Angeles Times.
Related article also availabe here.

Baltimoresun.com reports on Bush's announcement of a plan to prevent cyberspace attacks on U.S. interests. A $154 million budget was requested as preliminary funding for the initiative, which current and former government officials say is expected to become a seven-year, multibillion-dollar program to track threats in cyberspace on both government and private networks. Lawmakers who recently received briefings on the initiative, however, continue to have many questions, and some remain concerned about the legality of the program and whether it provides sufficient privacy protections. According to a former government official familiar with the proposal, the total start-up costs of the program are about $400 million. "The proposal 'will enhance the security of the Government's civilian cyber networks and will further address emerging threats,' Bush wrote to Congress as part of his request for additional money for cyber security and other counterterrorism measures. The initiative would first develop a comprehensive cyber security program for the government and then do the same for private networks, the former government official said."

Read the full article here.

According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the government's infrastructure sectors' plans lack protection against cyberattacks and disaster, pointing out that none of the sectors included all 30 cybersecurity criteria, such as key vulnerabilities and measures to reduce them. Among the 17 sectors of the government, information technology and communications had the strongest cybersecurity plans, and the agriculture, food and commercial sectors were the least comprehensive, according to David Powner, director of GAO's information technology management issues.

The Homeland Security Department provided a national plan last year for the sectors as a guide for their individual plans. Greg Garcia, DHS’ assistant secretary for cybersecurity and communications, said that DHS acknowledged the shortcomings based on GAO's findings, but he explained that these sector plans, released in May, represent only early efforts. Garcia further added that "sectors are not meant to be uniformly comprehensive in their cybersecurity efforts, and they must balance cybersecurity risk against other risk management efforts and unique aspects of their infrastructure 'based on its dependence on cyber elements.'" GAO recommended that DHS fully address the cybersecurity criteria by September 2008.

Read full article here.

"Buses equipped with wi-fi are being used to deliver web content to remote rural villages in the developing world. In rural India and parts of Rwanda, Cambodia and Paraguay, the vehicles offer web content to computers with no internet connection." United Villages is an initiative that provides communties in Asia, Africa, and Latin America with a digital access to locally-relevant products and services using a low-cost, store-and-forward "drive-by WiFi" technology. Mobile Access Points (MAPs) are installed on existing vehicles (e.g. buses and motorcycles) and automatically provide access for WiFi-enabled Kiosks along the roads. Whenever a MAP is within range of a real-time wireless Internet connection, it transfers the data from and for those Kiosks. The United Villages project also allows users to request specific information or content for a few additional rupees. The wi-fi vehicles also deliver as well as collect e-mails, and brings e-Commerce to the villagers.

Read the full article on BBC News.
More on United Villages on their website.

The article, Myth of privacy busted; Web advertisers scan e-mails, by Louise Story published on the International Herald Tribune, reports on the issue of online advertisers probing on privacy for marketing puposes. "At a meeting of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission about online privacy Thursday, the regulator's commissioner, Jon Leibowitz, said the agency would be exerting a tighter grip over online advertising. Leibowitz said that rules about the privacy policies of sites may need to be established... But some people from the online industry said the FTC should stay out." According to Randall Rothenberg, president and chief executive of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, if the FTC regulates online advertising, this could limit recent ''extraordinary pattern of innovation.''

After eight years since the FTC's public workshop on the use of consumer data in online ads, a lot of the hypothetical scenarios described back then are now a widespread reality. However, many executives in the advertising industry do not see anything wrong with online targeting, arguing that the practice benefits consumers, who see more relevant ads. They add further that for consumers, providing some innocuous personal data is a small trade-off for free access to the rich content of the Internet, much of which is ad-supported. A growing concern, even among online companies, about what information is being used to deliver ads to people is quite evident however.

''The market is getting edgier and edgier, and what is accepted in the marketplace gets dodgier and dodgier,'' said Martin Abrams, the executive director of the Center for Information Policy Leadership. ''We have really moved to a world where we say consumers need to police the market, and, increasingly, it is a harder world to police.''

Read the full article here.

Lani Kass, a former major in the Israeli Defense forces, an instructor at the National War College and also a senior mentor to Operation Checkmate, recently gave a talk at the Air Force Association Air and Space Conference on the future of warfare discussing what cyberspace and cyberwarfare.

"We have been using the electromagnetic spectrum longer than we have been using air and space," she said, noting that the telegraph, one of the most bedrock aspects of cyberspace, was developed around the time of the Civil War. What makes cyber different from the other realms, she said, is that it doesn't take a lot to fight in it. You don't have to build or buy expensive ships, airplanes, tanks or spacecraft. All you need is a laptop or a link to the Internet... That's important since people half a world away can do things now that can limit or eliminate the control of land, air, sea and space that make protections of modern freedoms possible, she said. "If you don't dominate cyber, you cannot dominate in air, or in space, you cannot dominate on land or at sea," she said. "Quite frankly, if you're a developed country, you cannot conduct your daily way of life. Your life essentially comes to a screeching halt."

Cyber Strike commander Lt. Gen. Robert J. Elder also spoke that afternoon of the efforts at Barksdale to make the cyber vision reality. This involves "determining and gathering the people to do the work, determining the new career and training avenues that need to be forged, assessing systems and software for the new missions, establishing command and control procedures and forging alliances with academia and industry, such as the $100 million Cyber Innovation Center being created north of Barksdale."

Read the full article on The Shreveport times.

CNN, on their article "Sources: Staged cyber attack reveals vulnerability in power grid," reports on how an experimental cyber attack conducted by researchers caused a generator to self-destruct. CNN captured a video of the generator shaking and smoking, and then shutting down. This new revelation has consequently alarmed the federal government and the electrical industry on the possibilities if such an attack were carried out on a larger scale. "Sources familiar with the experiment said the same attack scenario could be used against huge generators that produce the country's electric power. Some experts fear bigger, coordinated attacks could cause widespread damage to electric infrastructure that could take months to fix." The staged cyber attack, dubbed "Aurora," was conducted in March at the Department of Energy's Idaho lab.

Learn more about the staged cyber attack and continue reading the article here.