There seems to be no shortage of evidence as to the magnitude of the problems attributable to spam. While estimates vary, the National Office for the Information Economy cited data estimating that 50% of all inbound business email messages are spam. Productivity loss, technical support and infrastructure costs, monetary loss at the hands of fraudulent spammers and the exposure of children to offensive or inappropriate material are some of the consequences of spam. They add up to an estimated cost of $9.5 billion to Australian businesses annually.

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These groups and fractions of religiously brainwashed IT enthusiasts utilizing outdated ping and HTTP GET flooding attack tools, represent today's greatly overhyped threat possed by the cyber jihadists whose cheap PSYOPS dominate, given the lack of strategical thinking, and the lack of sustainable communication channels between them, ruined all of their Electronic Jihad campaigns so far.

Religious fundamentalism by itself evolves into religious fanaticism, and with the indoviduals in a desperate psychological need for a belonging to a cause, ends up in one of the oldest and easiest methods for recruitment - the one based on religious beliefs.

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The 2007 Cisco Annual Security Report, released in conjunction with the launch of the company's updated Cisco Security Center site , provides a concise summary of the past year's major issues. It offers predictions for security threats in 2008 and recommendations from Cisco security practitioners, such as Chief Security Officer John Stewart and Vice President of Customer Assurance and Security Programs Dave Goddard. While many end-of-year industry reports focus on content security threats (viruses, worms, trojans, spam and phishing), the Cisco report broadens the discussion to a set of seven risk management categories, many of which extend well beyond isolated content security issues.

The categories are vulnerability, physical, legal, trust, identity, human and geopolitical, and together they encompass security requirements that involve anti-malware protection, data-leakage protection, enterprise risk management, disaster planning, and more. The report's findings reinforce the fact that security threats and attacks have become more global and sophisticated. As the adoption of more and more IP-connected devices, applications, and communication methods increases, the opportunity emerges for a greater number of attacks. These trends are writing a new chapter in the history of security threats and attack methodologies.

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When computer hackers attacked Estonia earlier this year -- shutting down numerous Web sites connected to the country's electronic infrastructure, including government, commercial banks, media outlets and name servers -- the event was nothing new in the world of cyber-security. Since the mid-1990s, denial-of-service (DoS) attacks -- generally a computer assault that floods a network or Web site with unnecessary traffic, rendering it slow or completely interrupted -- have caused serious problems for the Internet.

DoS attacks are often waged by "botnets," which are a series of computers that have been hijacked by viruses and take part in attacks without their owners' knowledge. Attackers often launch attacks from unallocated IP addresses so the assailants can't be found.

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McAfee researcher Francois Paget discovered this and the company says it has reported its findings to the French government. The site has been attacked using an iFrame exploit that inserts an invisible frame in the page in order to re-direct some web browser connections to another location, which serves up a "downloader," code that attempts to reside on the victim machine. If the downloader is successful, the attacker can then remotely attempt to download other malware, "typically a bot or a password-stealing Trojan," says Dave Marcus, McAfee security researcher and communications manager.

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ICANN have released the news release below suggesting that CEOs and company directors need to tackle cybersecurity threats, as well as publishing a story on the ICANN blog. It is described as the must read paper on cybersecurity for CEOs.

"One thing is clear -- every business, every government, every organization that uses the Internet in its day-to-day operations is vulnerable. Simply put, cyber security is no longer 'one for the IT department.' Just as CEOs and Directors are responsible for ensuring that their Chief Financial Officers manage funds properly, they must now satisfy themselves that the Chief Information Officer has taken steps to safeguard the organization's resources."

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In yet another attempt at fighting the war on spyware, adware and viruses, the Cyber Security Enhancement Act was introduced to Congress on May 14th. This new act is a major step forward in the battle against botnet attacks.Botnets are groups of computers that hackers have gained access to illegally.

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Security experts have warned of a sharp hike in malicious activity coming out of China. Finjan has examined the new wave of Chinese attacks and the mechanisms used, and claims to have identified an "intricate network of connections" between China-based servers run by cyber-criminals.

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Currently, domain names in the .nz space only allow the 26 basic English (Latin) alphabet characters a-z, digits and the '-' hyphen. The Mâori alphabet has an additional five characters, the macronised vowels â, ç, î, ô, and û, which are currently not allowed in .nz domain names.

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Last month, hundreds of people descended on Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the second annual Internet Governance Forum.

Sponsored by the United Nations, the IGF attracted politicians, business leaders, technologists, civil society representatives, and others interested in the global issues facing the Internet.

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Free has announced that it is one of the first operators in the world to deploy IPv6. The standard is compatible with versions 4 and 5 of the Freebox. This new generation of IP protocol, set to spread in all devices in the coming years, optimises services development provided to customers. IPv6 is supported without requiring specific updates in the last version of the Windows Vista, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems

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According to McAfee's annual cyber security study, the rise in international cyber spying will pose the single biggest security threat in 2008. Other major trends include an increasing threat to online services such as banking, and the emergence of a complex and sophisticated market for malware.

The annual McAfee Virtual Criminology Report examines emerging global cyber security trends, with input from NATO, the FBI, SOCA and experts from leading groups and universities.

The report finds the following conclusions:

• Governments and allied groups are using the Internet for cyber spying and cyberattacks;
• Targets include critical national infrastructure network systems such as electricity, air traffic control, financial markets and government computer networks;
• 120 countries are now using the Internet for Web espionage operations;
• Many cyber attacks originate from China, and the Chinese have publicly stated that they are pursuing activities in cyber-espionage;
• Cyber assaults have become more sophisticated in their nature, designed to specifically slip under the radar of government cyber defences;
• Attacks have progressed from initial curiosity probes to well-funded and well organised operations for political, military, economic and technical espionage.  

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The Chinese Foreign Minister denied his country is using the internet to spy on others and said China has itself been a victim of cyber-espionage.

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With the 2008 being marked as the year of open source platforms in the wireless industry, mobile terrorism has become a reality of homeland security. In addition to extensive development in open source, the evolving quest towards Universal Mobile Torrents (UMTs) presents a catalyst of mobile malware distribution.

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Hackers have succeeded in breaking into the computer systems of two of the U.S.' most important science labs, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

More information can be found here.

High-tech crime is no longer just a threat to industry and individuals. Experts believe that cyberthreats to national security globally will constitute one of the biggest security threats in 2008 and beyond.

Evidence suggests that governments and government-allied groups are now using the Internet for espionage and cyberattacks on the critical national infrastructure (financial markets, utility providers, air traffic control) of other countries.

There were more reported cases in 2007 than any previous year. Here's a look into the cyber attacks on government targets that have taken place in the last 12 months.

More information can be found here.

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.

More information can be found here.

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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