"Internet Addiction Disorder." According to Wikipedia, "IAD was originally proposed as a disorder in a satirical hoax by Ivan Goldberg, M.D., in 1995. He took pathological gambling as diagnosed by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) as his model for the description of IAD. However, IAD receives coverage in the press, and its classification as a psychological disorder is being debated and researched."

In China, it is considered to be an epidemic. Last year China estimated that of the country's 40 million underage Internet users, some 10% were "addicted" to the Web. Surveys discovered that about 42% of these kids said they felt "addicted" while only 18% of US children felt similarly.

(Source: ComputerWorld)

Full story

ComputerWorld

"In a document that outlines a Digital Japan Creation Project, dubbed the ICT Hatoyama Plan, Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications revealed plans to build a massive cloud computing infrastructure to support all of the government’s IT systems. Called tentatively the Kasumigaseki Cloud, the new infrastructure will be built in stages from now until 2015."

"The goal of the project consolidate all government IT systems into a single cloud infrastructure to improve operation efficiency and reduce cost. 'The Kasumigaseki Cloud will enable various ministries to collaborate to integrate and consolidate hardware and create platforms for shared functions,' according to MIC. 'Efforts will be made to efficiently develop and operate information systems with the aim of greatly reducing electronic government–related development and operating costs while increasing the pace of processing by integrating shared functions, increasing collaboration among systems, and providing secure and advanced governmental services.'

According to the MIC, the Kasumigaseki Cloud will eliminate the need for individual ministries to maintain their own IT systems by consolidating current data centres, and allow each ministries to use only the computer resources necessary through the cloud platform. Additional proposals were put forth to develop and implement ubiquitous Green ICT solutions, including initiatives like the Kasumigaseki Cloud, boost ICT human resources, and the creation of 'safe and secure networks' for the public.

Read the full story on Green Telecom here.

This blog entry was shared through Bill St Arnaud's blog spot

1 April 2009 was the start of a new anti-piracy law in Sweden where, according to traffic data, an immediate and significant drop (over 30 per cent) occurred in the nation's overall Internet traffic.

"The combined traffic passing through Sweden's Internet Exchange Points usually peaks around 160 Gbit/s, but on Wednesday it peaked at around 110 Gbit/s. That's a huge drop in traffic, and is presumably a direct result of less file sharing taking place. ... Another interesting observation is that there was more traffic than usual during the last days before the law took effect. Were people hoarding films and music? On Tuesday (the day before the law went live) traffic peaked at nearly 200 GBit/s, roughly 25% above normal levels."

Read the full story and view the related statistics at CircleID. 

According to a article in the Indian Hindustan Times, "Indian diplomats now cannot open a Facebook account, use external e-mail services, or write blogs, thanks to new rules and much stricter firewalls aimed at preventing cyber attacks and leakage of classified information. Over the past eight months, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs has been overhauling its computer network security, putting up layers of barriers against intrusions into the network, officials associated with cyber security said. There are almost 600 computers at its headquarters at South Block, about half of which are connected to the Internet. Classified work is typically done on stand-alone computers, usually with the external drives removed. "We have set up a unified threat management system for the ministry. This simultaneously uses eight levels of protection like firewalls and spam mail filtering," said a senior official.

"We are also requesting and encouraging more responsible behaviour from our staff when working online," the official told IANS, requesting anonymity. A circular issued last week asked officials not to log on to social networking sites, specifically citing Facebook, Orkut and Ibibo as examples. The other prohibited practices include download of peer-to-peer music using sites like Kazaa and sharing of photos through Flickr and Picasa. The circular also discourages using services like G-mail, Yahoo! or Hotmail for official communication. A similar circular, officials said, had been issued in the Prime Minister's Office in December. But the matter is even more critical for the foreign office as officials posted in Indian missions abroad or on foreign tours tend to use web-based mail rather than the ministry's own mail system. "We have had cases of senior officers using G-mail or other similar accounts abroad for official work, only to find some form of tampering when they return," the official said, adding people have been told to change their web-mail passwords if they had opened the account during foreign tours. The missions have been told to use their official mail ID issued by the National Informatics Centre for communication. But several missions have complained that the mail home page was inaccessible due to port blocks by local Internet service providers. They have been asked to contact their service providers to unblock the site. "We want to secure communications with Indian missions through private networks. This may be implemented in the next few months," said an official working with the technical team in the ministry.

Read the full article here.

The ITU-D recruited an expert to produce a study report concerning "Electronic Government for Developing Countries", which is intended to help address challenges in formulating e-Government policies. The draft version as of August 2008 is now available online on the ITU-D ICT Applications and Cybersecurity Division (CYB) website.

The purpose of this report is to examine the adoption of e-Government services in countries with developing economies. As the day-to-day business of a public administration is to build on data and information, using the latter is critical to help ensuring its accountability, managing its operations, and to allow its citizens to participate in the country's governance. With the revolutionary changes that ICTs are bringing to our global society, public administrations worldwide continue to develop more sophisticated ways to digitize their operations and practices so that they can offer the public access to government services in more effective and efficient ways.

The seven key recommendations outlined in this report are:

• Developing a strategic plan to guide e-Government services;
• Understanding the needs of citizens and of all public administration segments;
• Using well established system development practices for e-Government services;
• Creating a learning organization;
• Developing effective ICT governance mechanisms;
• Developing ICT capabilities, including human resources capacity building and suitable ICT infrastructure; and
• Developing an e-Government security and disaster recovery plan.

To continue reading the report and its case studies, click here. More information on ITU-D activities related to ICT applications, click here.

BBC News recently reported the arrest of five hackers described as being among the most active on the internet. The hackers, who include two 16-year-olds, are accused of disrupting government websites in the United States, Asia and Latin America. Spanish police say the hackers co-ordinated attacks over the internet and hacked into 21,000 web pages over two years.

Read the full report here.

The Guardian recently reports on a survey into ways in which colleges and universities can make computing greener and more sustainable. Preliminary findings of the study is about to be published soon. "Higher Education Environment Performance Improvement (Heepi) and SustainIT, an NGO set up to focus on the environmental and social impact of IT, are researching how sustainable further and higher education IT is, and how education best practice compares with the private sector. The report being written for the Joint Information System Committee (Jisc) says green IT is best achieved through the collaboration of IT and estates management." Among the findings is that increased energy and computing costs can be offset by technologies such as grid computing and virtualisation. According to Peter James, author of the report and is also part-time professor of environmental management at Bradford University and associate director of SustainIT, "Eighty to 90% of a computer's capacity is wasted. By linking PCs together we can run complex computing tasks broken down into manageable chunks when the computers are not in normal classroom use."

The publication of Heepi and SustainIT's interim report in June marks the start of a series of up to seven campus IT open days to be held throughout the UK until October and designed to allow IT managers a chance to see the latest sustainable initiatives for themselves. At least one event will be focused on the further education sector and based around the virtualisation programme at Stockport college.

Read the full article here.

According to an article on The Citizen (Dar es Salaam) on 10 May 2008, toll-free mobile services are on its way to selected remote areas in Africa aiming to save lives by connecting people with emergency medical cases to health personnel. Under the initiative launched in Nairobi on Wednesday, health workers will also be trained through mobile phone sessions on day to day skills like collecting and sharing basic household health information.

Telecommunication equipment provider Ericsson and mobile phone service provider Zain have entered into a partnership that will ensure they provide network access, mobile phone handsets, sim cards and toll-free emergency numbers in remote areas in order to stimulate demand for cellular phone solutions in those areas. The initiative is being rolled out in Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya. In Kenya, Ericsson and Zain subsidiary, Celtel, are rolling out a pilot programme in North Garissa in Dertu village targeting some 5,200 inhabitants.

According to the President of Ericsson, Mr Carl-Henri Svanberge, the partnership also includes the Earth Institute and will benefit 400,000 people in Africa. "The partnership will provide the development of a comprehensive voice to data coverage and a telecommunication strategy in the villages to drive up mobile connectivity," said Mr Svanberge. The phones will use solar charges which according to Ericsson are capable of charging 30 mobile phones a day.

Information Security experts recently revealed that government networks in Blighty and UN computers have been hacked and ensnared in a botnet. According to Websense, the attacks happened in March using some sort of SQL injection. It was said that the number of computers compromised is impossible to know but an estimate could be around 100,000 URLs. "A victim reaching a hacked site will be redirected a different page, hosted on a Chinese server. The IP address keeps changing within the JavaScript making it hard to locate."

Read the full article here.

According to China's Computer Emergency Response Team (CN-CERT)'s 2007 annual report released last week, the greatest threat to the nation's portion of the internet are Trojan horse programs and bot software. Based on CN-CERT's findings, "the number of Chinese Internet addresses with one or more infected systems increased by a factor of 22 in 2007... [and] of 6.23 million bot-infected computers on the Internet, about 3.62 million are in China's address space." The report alse reveals that "domain name registration in the nation had almost tripled in the past year, attacks that tampered with legitimate Web sites grew 1.5 times, and malicious drive-by attacks jumped 2.6 times."

The report is currently only available in Chinese.
Read the full article 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.

The Australian federal Government's plan to have internet service providers filter pornography and other internet content deemed inappropriate for children is going full-steam ahead. The Government wants to evaluate content filters in a controlled environment. Trials are to be conducted soon in a closed environment in Tasmania. Enex TestLab was selected more than six months ago after the Australian Communications and Media Authority closed a tender for an organisation to test ISP-based content filters. ISP-based filters will block inappropriate web pages at service provider level and automatically relay a clean feed to households. To be exempted, users will have to individually contact their ISPs. The trial will evaluate ISP-level internet content filters in a controlled environment while filtering content inappropriate for children, Enex said. "We invite vendors of all types (hardware appliances, software - proprietary or open-source) of ISP-based internet content filters to participate." The testing is slated for completion by July and will be followed by live field trials.

The internet sector has consistently voiced concern about the Government's ISP filters. Internet Industry Association chief executive Peter Coroneos has said any clean feed policy would have to be balanced against the likely financial and performance costs, and ACMA's first annual report to Senator Conroy confirmed his fears. On the performance impact of filters, ACMA said: "In the case of personal computers the cost of upgrading processing power may be modest (although significant in terms of household income). "However, for ISPs the cost of upgrading or augmenting the expensive hardware that they typically deploy may be substantial, particularly for small providers."

Read the full article on the Australian IT.

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.

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.

Microsoft releases the Asia Pacific Legislative Analysis: Current and Pending Online Safety and Cybercrime Laws, a study providing a high-level snapshot of the status of computer security, privacy, spam and online child safety legislation in the Asia Pacific region. Detailed analyses of these laws specific to Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, The Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam are also provided in this paper. For more information regarding this document, contact Julie Inman Grant, Regional Director, Corporate Affairs of Internet Safety and Security at Microsoft Asia Pacific. More Cybersecurity Legislation and Enforcement related resources are available at the CYB website.

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.

After the infamous Estonian cyberattack early this year, CyTRAP Labs proposes the 7 lessons learnt from the attacks, and points out how Estonia responded accordingly to these issues. Among the lessons and issues pointed out were:

This list was made in reference to the presentation of Hillar Aarelaid, eSStonia - the case of the Estonian DDoS attacks, given at the GovCERT.NL IT Security Symposium, Response & Responsibility, in Noordwijk, Netherlands.

Read the full article here.

The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee recently states that the UK government has failed to understand the threat to the continued growth of the internet posed by cybercrime as evident in their response to the committee's report on personal internet security, published on 10 August. The Lords' report had warned of the danger that public confidence in the internet would be lost, due to "perception that the internet is a lawless 'Wild West'." In the government's reply, presented to Parliament on 24 October, the government rejected this as well as the recommendation that there should be a data-breach notification law to provide businesses with incentives to take better care of customer data. According to the government, this kind of law that forced companies to admit when they had been the victims of cybercrime does not prove to be effective, but reassures businesses that they will consider finding "more formal ways" of reporting security breaches to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) "when problems arise". The government also rejected calls for software and hardware vendors to be liable for the security of their products, and for banks to guarantee e-fraud refunds.

Read the full article at ZDNet.co.uk.

World War 2.0, a news video on Wired Science, presents the realities of internet warfare and how a botnet attack against Estonia might have been a manifestation of this new war technique. Botnets are so powerful, and hackers are very skilled and experienced that they can "destroy servers of a whole state." Josh Davis traced back when the attack against Estonia started and how security officials in Estonia fought back. Bill Woodcock, founder of Packet Clearing House, provides a brief explanation on how a botnet operates and how the attack against Estonia happened. Jaak Aaviksoo, Estonian Defense Minister, Ago Väärsi, technical manager at Postimees.ee, and Hillar Aareland, head of the Estonian CERT, were also interviewed as well as Russian internet security expert Emin Azizov and IT director of the United Civilian Front Eugeni Grigorian. Learn more about the attack by watching the video report here.

John E. Dunn of Techworld reports on the Austrian Police's intention to use specially-crafted Trojans to remotely monitor criminal suspects.

"According to reports in Austrian media, the minister of justice Maria Berger, and Interior Minister Gunther Plater, have drafted a proposal that will be amended by legal experts and the cabinet with the intention of allowing police to carry out such surveillance legally with a judge’s warrant... According to Berger, Trojans would only be used in cases of serious crime, such as terrorism and organised racketeering. The Swiss authorities have declared the intention of using the same controversial technique, but only in cases of the most extreme nature, such as terrorism... The Austrian, German and Swiss governments have yet to explain how they would circumvent security programs that might be used by criminals to protect themselves, whether this would involve collusion with security software companies, and what would happen if such software-busting Trojans were subsequently reverse engineered and deployed by criminals themselves."

Read the full article on Techworld.

The International Herald Tribune reports on Russian hackers being one of the biggest threats to internet security.

"Internet security experts say that only the United States and China rival Russia in hacker activity. But Russia has only 28 million Internet users, according to rough estimates, compared with 210 million in the United States and 150 million in China, meaning that Russia has a higher percentage of scammers. VeriSign, the Internet services company, considers Russian hackers to be the worst, in part because they tend to have ties to organized crime outfits that embezzle money with stolen bank and credit card information... While the West has complained about Russian laws and enforcement, some Russian officials take issue with the criticism. Aleksei Likhachev, a member of Parliament, acknowledged that there had been fewer criminal cases in Russia than elsewhere, but said officials were still learning how to conduct such inquiries. 'It is just that this work is much younger and much less developed in Russia,' he said."

Read the full article, Russian hackers: On the right side of soft laws.

After Japan's Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry signed a joint statement with the German Federal Economics and Technology Ministry in July, Japan continues to exert concerted effort to tackle the issue of spam. "The ministry has regularly exchanged opinions on the issue at multilateral meetings, such as those of the International Telecommunication Union and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Conference... France and other countries, with which Japan has established a close partnership on the issue, have gone a step ahead of Japan by introducing an "opt-in" system, under which people are not permitted to send ad e-mails without the prior consent of the people to whom they intend to send them." Opinions concerning fines and punishment for spammers appear to be quite divided among countries though with some countries charging heavier fines than others.

Read the full article here.

The Information for Development Program (infoDev) of The World Bank identified trends in 53 African countries related to the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in education.

The report indicates a shift from small-scale pilot projects supported by donors and NGOs to a systematic policy and multi-stakeholder approach. While the degree of e-readiness varies from country to country, there is a growing commitment to using ICTs in education throughout administrations on the continent.

The survey finds some notable trends in the areas as follows:

• Public-private partnerships
• Digital content
• Open source software and operating systems
• Regional initiatives
• National research and education networks
• Internet connectivity
• Wireless networks

To read the summary report, click here.

To read the full article, click here.

Heise Online recently reported "on a ruling, dated March 27, 2007, which has only now been published and is likely to have legal ramifications, the local court of the Berlin district of Mitte has barred the Federal Ministry of Justice from retaining personal data acquired via its website beyond the periods associated with the specific instances of use of the site... The local court also opposed the view espoused by operators and some data privacy watchdogs that security reasons justify a recording regime that over short periods of time maps the behavior of all Net users and allows individual users to be picked out." Slashdot adds that "German privacy activists have started a campaign Wir speichern nicht, ("we don't log your data!") which provides manuals how to turn off the IP logging on your server."

In response to this ruling, Patrick Breyer of the German Working Group on Data Retention, who was the plaintiff in the relevant case, has called on all public authorities, departments and agencies of the German Federal State and of the federal states comprising the Federal Republic to abandon their "illegal data retention policies" by the end of this year at the very latest or have additional lawsuits filed. Breyer has made a model complaint available on his website.

Read the complete news report here.