The Federal Trade Commission today released a survey showing that 8.3 million American adults, or 3.7 percent of all American adults, were victims of identity theft in 2005. Of the victims, 3.2 million, or 1.4 percent of all adults, experienced misuse of their existing credit card accounts; 3.3 million, or 1.5 percent, experienced misuse of non-credit card accounts; and 1.8 million victims, or 0.8 percent, found that new accounts were opened or other frauds were committed using their personal identifying information.

More information can be found here.

Cyber criminals and cyber spies have shifted their focus again, successfully evading the countermeasures that most companies and government agencies have worked for years to put into place.

Facing real improvements in system and network security, the attackers now have two new prime targets that allow them to evade firewalls, antivirus and even intrusion prevention tools: users who are easily misled and custom-built applications. This is a major shift from prior years when attackers limited most of their targets to flaws in commonly used software.

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Additional information can be found here.

Europe’s Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are taking greater strides to improve the quality of their services and reduce the amount of infected or unwanted mail in users’ inboxes, but firms are still labouring under email-borne viruses and messaging overload, according to experts speaking at this week’s Inbox Outbox email event in London.

More information can be found here.

"Two years from now, spam will be solved." — Microsoft's (MSFT) Bill Gates, 2004, World Economic Forum in Switzerland .

Why, in 2007, is spam worse than ever? Let exasperated consumers count the ways: PDF spam. MP3 spam. Pump-and-dump spam. E-card spam.

More information can be found here.

Millions of young people have made themselves vulnerable to identity theft as well as putting their future academic and professional prospects at risk by recklessly posting personal information on the internet, Britain's privacy watchdog warns in a report published on 23 November 2007.

More information can be found here.

At the height of cold war tensions, someone seems to have asked the mathematician and philosopher Sir Bertrand Russell who championed global peace and denuclearisation, about the possibility of a third world war taking place.

Russell replied characteristically- “I am not so sure about the third world war but I can assure you that the fourth one would be fought with stones and arrows.” Russell could not live to see the computer revolution otherwise he would have said that the third world war would be fought in cyberspace.

The threat of a global cyberwarfare is looming large. Today among 120 countries working on cyberwarfare, China, aiming to become a superpower, has emerged as a leader. India is nowhere in picture and even the website of National Defense Academy was hacked by amateurs.

More information can be found here.

The Baltics’ reputation for being in the vanguard of the fight against cyber-crime has been further enhanced at a conference that took place just outside the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius from Nov 20-22.

Delegates attending the Third European Network and Information Security Conference discussed a wide range of cyber-security issues including how to combat email spam, prevent illegal content such as child pornography and how to react to ‘cyber-attacks’ like those launched against Estonian websites and computer systems in April and May 2007.

The keynote speech was given by Andrea Pirotti, Executive Director of the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA). “Lithuania is one of several European Union member states that put a lot of effort into the field of security issues,” Pirotti told delegates.

But the most startling speech was given by Alexander Ntoko, Head of Corporate Strategy at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). He suggested that virtual attacks may soon turn into real-life, physical attacks by means of robots controlled via the Internet.

More information can be found here.

The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee have highlighted the threat to the future of the Internet posed by e-crime, and have argued that the Government must do more to protect individual Internet users.

The full report can be viewed here

The UK-based online identity firm Garlik released in early September a study prepared by the British based criminology firm 1871 Ltd. which was focused on quantifying cybercrime in the UK.

The report concluded that there were an estimated 1.9 million incidents of cybercrime committed in the UK in 2006, or about one every 10 seconds. These incidents were defined as "offences against the person including abusive or threatening emails, false or offensive accusations posted on websites and blackmail perpetrated over the internet."

The report concludes that “Although measuring cybercrime is difficult, it is clear that in many instances it is outstripping ‘traditional’ crime. This is a result of the unparalleled opportunities that the internet gives both for making familiar crimes easier and for enabling ‘pure’ cybercrimes that could not exist without the Internet.”

The U.S. Senate has passed a bill that would allow victims of online identity theft schemes to seek restitution from criminals and expands the definition of cyberextortion.

The Senate passed the Identity Theft Enforcement and Restitution Act by unanimous consent last week. The bill, introduced a month ago by Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, allows victims of identity theft to seek restitution for the time they spend to fix the problems. The bill would allow prosecutors to go after criminals who threaten to take or release information from computers with cyberextortion, and it would allow prosecutors to charge cybercriminals with conspiracy to commit a cybercrime.

More information can be found here.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Unesco and Icann will collaborate on global efforts to forge universal standards towards building a multilingual cyberspace.

The three agencies organised a workshop on the subject at this week's Internet Governance Forum (IGF) taking place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The partners said multilingualism is a key concept to ensure cultural diversity and participation for all linguistic groups in cyberspace.

There is growing concern that hundreds of local languages may be sidestepped, albeit unintentionally, in the radical expansion of internet communication and information, they said.

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VoIP is dead, over and “out!” IP interactive communications (IC) or unified communications (UC) is “in!” IC or UC is much more than voice. Even the acronyms suggest so - “I see” and “You see.”  It’s more than just video. It’s insight gained from the availability of your family’s, friend’s or colleague’s presence information and the ability to collaborate for business, learning or pleasure with the simultaneous use of data applications. Sounds like network nirvana! 

But how will this really work? IC and UC services and applications will only become valuable when we can use them to reach anyone, anywhere, anytime. To paraphrase Metcalfe’s Law: the usefulness, or utility, of interactive communication equals the square of the number of users. Consequently, IC/UC must span multiple IP networks – business, residential and mobile; wireline, wireless and cable. Today’s consumers and businesses will be satisfied with—and pay money for—nothing less. 

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LOS ANGELES : Peter Dengate Thrush, a New Zealand lawyer, has been elected unanimously as the new Chairman of the Board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

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A meeting on Internet governance in Rio de Janeiro later this month will bring together participants from around the world to discuss issues ranging from open standards to child protection and child pornography, a senior United Nations official said today.

Speaking to the press in Geneva ahead of the second Internet Governance Forum meeting, to be held from 12-15 November, Markus Kummer, Executive Coordinator of the Forum Secretariat, said more than 1,500 participants had registered 10 days before the event was set to begin.

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The nonprofit organization that manages the Internet's domain-name system is set to vote Wednesday on changes to the Web site registration process that would make it easier for people to shield their identities online and, indirectly, cut spammers off from an easy-to-mine database of legitimate e-mail addresses.

The proposed change to the public Web site registration database -- known as "WHOIS" -- is expected to be considered Wednesday by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Los Angeles-based group that oversees key technical matters governing how computers communicate over the Internet.

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The upcoming second Internet Governance Forum in Rio de Janeiro will have a very broad agenda with over thirty workshops, 22 best practice forums and 10 meetings of dynamic coalitions specialising in key issues such as access, diversity, openness and security.

One outstanding issue at the 12-15 November forum is the renewed debate about critical Internet resources like IP (Internet Protocol) addresses, domain names and the overall functioning of the domain name system.

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The Whois database may disappear.

An Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers committee is considering a sunset proposal at its meeting this week in Los Angeles that would effectively scrap the directory system on privacy grounds. Among those arguments is that a public-by-default Whois listing may run afoul of Canadian and European Union privacy laws.

Having this debate is not a bad idea. It's about time that we rethought whether the Whois directory service--which has public contact information for domain name owners--should exist in its current form.

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Telecom New Zealand International (TNZI) has signed an IP network interconnection agreement with Hong Kong-based PCCW Global, strengthening Asian IP network coverage for both firms. The deal will allow the two providers to interconnect their respective telecoms networks to supply services to each other. Anthony Briscoe, general manager at TNZI, said: ‘This agreement marks a significant milestone for the Telecom New Zealand Group to expand our IP network footprint to support mission-critical applications globally

Source: TeleGeography 

In May, ARIN, the organization giving out IP address in North America, told us it's time to start adopting IPv6. Five months and another 76 million IPv4 addresses later, ARIN's European counterpart, Réseaux IP Européens (RIPE) adopted a resolution in much the same vein during its fall meeting last week.

The RIPE Network Coordination Centre (NCC) is responsible for the actual distribution of IP addresses, while RIPE is the community part of the RIPE NCC

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According to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, the invention relates to an "Internet protocol (IP) network communication device which allows facsimile communication conforming to instrumentation table unit (ITU)-T recommendation V.34 in the network conforming to ITU-T recommendation T.38

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Gordon Cook interviewed on October 23rd with John Curran, Board Chair of ARIN the North American Regional Internet Routing Registry for the last decade.

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After ignoring the Internet for years to focus on controlling traditional media such as television and newspapers, the Kremlin and its allies are turning their attention to cyberspace, which remains a haven for critical reporting and vibrant discussion in Russia's dwindling public sphere.

Allies of President Vladimir Putin are creating pro-government news and pop culture Web sites while purchasing some established online outlets known for independent journalism. They are nurturing a network of friendly bloggers ready to disseminate propaganda on command. And there is talk of creating a new Russian computer network -- one that would be separate from the Internet at large and, potentially, much easier for the authorities to control.

"The attractiveness of the Internet as a free platform for free people is already dimming," said Iosif Dzyaloshinsky, a mass media expert at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

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Internet oversight agency ICANN has launched an investigation into the possibility that insider information is being used to snap up desirable domain names before the person or organisation likely to be interested in them has had a chance to buy.

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Internet users in Bulgaria can now experiment with their name in their language on their Internet after the launch of the sale of domain names in Cyrillic. The selling company is called Uninet Association in cooperation with i-DNS.net International.

In 1999, i-DNS.net pioneered the Internationalized Domain Name System, becoming the first Registry to resolve, administer, and deploy full multilingual, native-character domain names. To date, i-DNS.net supports domain name registrations in more than 60 languages, and the list continues to grow.

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The scale of intellectual property crimes is "overwhelming" in Asia and law enforcement agencies need to work together to fight piracy and counterfeiting in the region, officials said on Tuesday. Details of the proposed IP Crimes Enforcement Network will be worked out by some 70 police, customs officials and prosecutors from 13 Asia-Pacific nations gathered in Bangkok this week.

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NeuStar won a new contract to run .us, winning out over .info registry Afilias to manage America's country code top-level domain. The U.S. Department of Commerce posted the award notice Oct. 18 and Friday signed a three- year contract with two one-year options, NTIA said. NeuStar's original contract expires Oct. 25. NeuStar's bid "met our selection criteria and we are confident of its ability to manage the .us domain space," said NTIA Administrator John Kneuer. NTIA will supervise administration of the domain to ensure stability and security, working closely with the registry to spur its growth, particularly in the kids.us space, he said

Source: Warren's Washington Internet Daily - Volume 8; Issue 203