The number of viruses, worms and trojans in circulation has topped the one million mark.

The new high for malicious programs was revealed by security firm Symantec in the latest edition of its bi-annual Internet Security Threat Report.

The vast majority of these programs have been created in the last twelve months, said Symantec.

Cyber criminals pump out malware to fool anti-virus programs which look for characteristics they have already seen.

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Date: April 8, 2008

Author: Joe Stewart, Director of Malware Research, SecureWorks

Highlights

1. Collectively the top botnets are capable of sending over 100 billion spams per day
2. Srizbi maintains the top spot both in terms of number of bots and spamming capacity
3. Storm is only a fraction of its former self, and is rapidly becoming a minor player
4. Bobax, probably the longest-lived of the template-based spamming botnets is still around, and ranks #2 in number of bots
5. Ozdok/Mega-D is still relatively small in numbers, but makes up for its diminutive size with aggressive amounts of spam sent per bot

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By John Leyden for The Register

Financial losses from online crime reported to US authorities reached a record high last year, topping nearly $240m. Taking into account unreported crimes the real figure is likely to be much higher.

Auction fraud and other forms of cybercrime reported to the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) were up $40m or 20 per cent from those reported in 2006. The IC3 received 206,884 complaints about internet crimes last year, more than 90,000 of which were referred to law enforcement agencies across the US. IC3, which serves as a clearing house for cybercrime, is a joint operation between the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center.

 

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U.S. federal government officials are confident they will meet a June 30 deadline to support IPv6 on their backbone networks, but they see challenges ahead in transitioning their production networks to this long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol.

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The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) ousted a record number of "cybersquatters" from Web sites with domain names referring to trademarked companies, foundations and celebrities in 2007.

WIPO, a U.N. agency based in Geneva, received 2,156 complaints alleging "abusive registration of trademarks on the Internet" last year, up 18 percent from 2006 and 48 percent more than the filings lodged in 2005.

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The Scottish National Party not only wants to break up the Union, it has emerged that it is also seeking virtual independence in cyberspace.

Alex Salmond is to lodge a formal request with the organisation responsible for all internet domain names seeking a ".sco" suffix to replace the distinctly Unionist ".co.uk".

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Does this mean the Net cannot further develop?

Is it really happening? Are we really going to run out of IP addresses? The answer is yes, but the outlook isn’t as bleak as it appears.

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By Darren Waters Technology editor, BBC News website

More than a quarter of eight to 11-year-olds in the UK have a profile on a social network, research shows.

Most sites, such as Bebo, MySpace and Facebook, set a minimum age of between 13 and 14 to create a profile but none actively enforce the age requirement.

Almost half of all eight to 17-year-olds online have a profile, regulator Ofcom found in a survey of 5,000 adults and over 3,000 children.

Ofcom says parents need to learn more about their children's online lives.

The Ofcom report looks into the impact of social networks on people's lives in the UK as part of a wider media literacy campaign and surveyed 5,000 adults and more than 3,000 children.

"Social networks are clearly a very important part of people's lives and are having an impact on how people live their lives," said James Thickett, director of market research at Ofcom.

He added: "Children's lives are very different from what they were 20 years ago. Social networks are a way of creating a social bond."

The Home Office has been working with social networking firms and is expected to publish a set of guidelines for the sites around best practice, security and privacy on Friday.

The report is expected to recommend that profiles created by children are set to private by default, or are only viewable by friends nominated by the user.

The three leading social networks, MySpace, Bebo and Facebook, all say they remove profiles of users that are found to be too young on their sites.

But at present no technology is used to actively verify the age of users.

The Home Office guidelines are set to encourage social networking sites to investigate age verification technologies and to give better signposting to users about privacy settings, and warnings about the implications of posting personal details.

A spokesman for MySpace said the firm "proactively ensures that profiles of 14 and 15-year-olds are automatically made private so that users are protected from adults they don't already know in the offline world".

The company said in the future all of its users under 18 would have profiles set automatically to private.

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Two groups working separately to boost Europe's defenses against online crime will present proposals this week, almost a year after most of the nation of Estonia's links to the Internet were disrupted for days or weeks.

At a two-day conference starting Tuesday in Strasbourg, France, the Council of Europe will to review implementation of the international Convention on Cybercrime and discuss ways to improve international cooperation.

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In this excerpt from Infrastructure Protection in the Ancient World, two CSOs argue that we still need to heed the security lessons that Romans learned 2,000 years ago.

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The era of computer began with the analytical engine of Charles Babbage. But with the latest increase and advancement in technology, modern computer started consisting of integrated circuits and microprocessors. Technology is changing like seasons, every year new technology gets introduced. One such technology is the Internet - world’s largest database of any information whether its science, commerce, art or anything for which information can be collected.

So we can say that the Internet is the biggest library in the world. Life is a mix of good and bad. The same is true about the Internet. This world of Internet is filled with Trojan horses and viruses to cyber stalking, trademark counterfeiting and cyber terrorism, email fraud, defamation etc, all this without the police control over the Internet unlike the conventional societies. No policemen can patrol the Internet to search for the cyber criminals.

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India and Vietnam on Monday, 24 March 2008 signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for bilateral cooperation on security matters which would include international terrorism, illicit drug trafficking and trans-national crime. The MOU was signed following delegation-level talks between the Union Home Minister, Shivraj Patil and the visiting Vietnamese Minister for Public Security, General Le Hong Anh.

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The EDUCAUSE/Internet Security Task Force provided a briefing to the CSIS Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th Presidency on March 12, 2008, during the event "Improving Cybersecurity: Recommendations from Private Sector Experts". A 1-page summary of the briefing is available, as well as the complete transcript.

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Governments need to do more than just protect themselves against cyber attacks, says Bill Thompson. In common with other administrations the UK government is concerned about the security of the realm and its ability to cope with natural disasters, foreign aggression and terrorism.

Over the years the importance of computer systems, networks and of course the internet have become apparent even at the highest level of the administration. So it is unsurprising that the National Security Strategy announced by the Prime Minister last week contains a number of references to the network and to the growing fear of what it calls "cyber-attack".

The strategy notes that "the internet is itself a trans-national, fast-changing and loosely-governed entity, but is also part of our critical national infrastructure" before stating the obvious by pointing out that "it is both a target and an opportunity for hostile states, terrorists and criminals".

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Foreign firms and the feds are seeing better performance and security -- plus a range of mobile and collaboration apps beginning to emerge.

There are just 100 days left for federal agencies to change over from IPv4 — the version 4 of the Internet Protocol that everyone uses — to the IPv6 version. In the fast-approaching future where everything from PCs to cars, from alarms to toasters, from phones to cereal packages has an IP address and is connected to the Web, IPv6 promises to make many more IP addresses available — enough addresses for every conceivable use. Oh, and IPv6 will make Internet communications more secure through better identity verification

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AT&T Inc. has announced that, according to the results of a survey from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) conducted for AT&T, global Internet Protocol (IP) networks are integral to promoting successful collaborative relationships and are a key to doing business globally.

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Cisco and the Bulgarian State Agency for Information Technologies and Communications (DAITS) announced the opening of what they claim is Southeast Europe's first lab for training and research related to Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). Cisco is donating lab’s networking and communication equipment.

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Estonia called on the European Union on Wednesday to make cyber attacks a criminal offense to stop Internet users from freezing public and private Web sites for political revenge. Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves said he believed the Russian government was behind an online attack on Estonia over its decision to move a Red Army monument from a square in the capital Tallin. Russia has denied any involvement.

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As per the information tracked by, and reported to Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), Department of Information Technology, a number of Government websites have been hacked during the period January, 2005 to February, 2008; of which one pertained to a defence related pay office in January, 2006.

The websites hacked included those belonging to Ministry of Railways, Air Cargo Customs (Mumbai), Forward markets Commission, National Institute of Health and Family Welfare, National Institute of Social Defence, Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances, Wireless Planning & Coordination Wing, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, Department of Information Technology and Anthropological Survey of India.

The websites were hacked by exploiting technical vulnerabilities in the operating systems, web server, database software and application software.

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The Honourable Stockwell Day, Minister of Public Safety, announced that Canada will participate in an international cyber security exercise named Cyber Storm II. The exercise will take place in March 2008, and involve participants from Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

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The centre must take some effort to streamline Indian cyber laws so that the laws are strong. Although the government has proposed some amendments to the Information Technology Act, 2000 they have not yet become part of the law.

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PHILADELPHIA - (Business Wire) The 71^st Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meeting is now underway in Philadelphia, in what some are describing as a weeklong “IPv6 experience.”

The IETF is the premiere Internet standards development body, responsible for creating the technologies at the heart of the Internet's infrastructure, including the standards for email, chat, Internet telephony, and of course the Internet address protocols IPv4 and IPv6

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Video recordings of Google’s IPv6 conference held on January 29, 2008 have been posted on YouTube. The conference was part of Google Tech Talks and includes a panel discussion called “What will the IPv6 Internet look like?”

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Indeed 2007 was a big year for IPv6. The five regional Internet registries (RIR) -- tasked by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority to govern IP address allocations -- made a total of 379 IPv6 allocations last year. That is about 70% growth from 2006 and close to the 2002 peak, a dramatic jump from what was a 5-year pattern of decline. Clearly there is interest and movement towards IPv6.

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The March 2008 Domain Name Industry Brief released by VeriSign reports that “the Domain Name Industry closed 2007 with more than 153 million domain name registrations worldwide across all of the Top-Level Domain Names (TLDs), an increase of nearly 33 million domain name registrations since the close of 2006.”

The full report can be found at: http://www.verisign.com/static/043379.pdf

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The head of the world's largest police organization, Interpol, says he is satisfied with China's security preparations for the Beijing Olympics. He was speaking at Interpol's Asian Regional Conference in Hong Kong, where senior law enforcement officials from across Asia discuss ways to strengthen cooperation in combating crime - ranging from sex attacks on children to cyber crime.

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There is no reliable way for consumers, regulators, and businesses to assess the relative incidence of identity fraud at major financial institutions. This lack of information prevents more vigorous competition among institutions to protect accountholders from identity theft. As part of a multiple strategy approach to obtaining more actionable data on identity theft, the Freedom of Information Act was used to obtain complaint data submitted by victims in 2006 to the Federal Trade Commission.

This complaint data identifies the institution where impostors established fraudulent accounts or affected existing accounts in the name of the victim. The data show that some institutions have a far greater incidence of identity theft than others. The data further show that the major telecommunications companies had numerous identity theft events, but a metric is lacking to compare this industry with the financial institutions. This is a first attempt to meaningfully compare institutions on their performance in avoiding identity theft.

This analysis faces several challenges that are described in the methods section.

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ICANN's Nominating Committee invites Statements of Interest from the Internet community as it seeks qualified candidates to assist in ICANN's technical and policy coordination role. Interested individuals are invited to submit a Statement of Interest to this year's Committee for the following positions:

• Two members of the ICANN Board of Directors
• One member of the Council of the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO)
• One member of the Council of the Country-Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO)
• Two members of the At Large Advisory Committee (ALAC)

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By John Leyden

Published Monday 25th February 2008 17:10 GMT