The Internet has created borderless societies worldwide changing how information is shared, said the Department of Communications in a statement on Tuesday. H.E. Minister of Communications Dr Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri added that there was a need to protect and empower consumers online by ensuring secured online transactions.

In South Africa, the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act provided for the appointment of cyber inspectors, but "there is a need for building a culture of security in the face of rapid technological and socioeconomic changes and illiteracy levels particularly in developing countries is urgent," she added.

At international level, initiatives such as the ITU's High Level Expert Group aimed to develop strategies and guidance to countries in dealing with cybercrime. International Multilateral Partnership Against Cyber-Terrorism would contribute to forging partnerships and collaborations geared towards combating cyber crime, thus building confidence in the use of Internet. The outcomes would assist countries to draft their legislative framework and to develop strategies to address the challenges of cyber threats and cybercrime.

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More information about the ITU's High level Expert Group of the Global Cybersceurity Agenda can be found here

A social networking site has deleted most of its users over the age of 36 because it claims older users pose a danger of sex offending. It claims to be forced into the action by the Government, but the part of a law it cites is not yet in force. Faceparty has deleted what it describes as "a huge number of accounts" from its social networking site in recent weeks. It lists 'over 36 years old' as one of its reasons for deletion. "We understand that only a minority of older users are sex offenders, but you must understand that we cannot tell which," it says in its explanation of the deletion of accounts. "New government legislation means we need to check older users on the sex offenders list," says its notice. "This legislation is based upon checking email addresses against a government provided list. Faceparty has never insisted on validated email addresses and can therefore not participate in this new scheme." A new law was passed earlier this month, the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act, which contains provisions for the Secretary of State to require sex offenders to register their email addresses or other information. That, though, is not currently part of the law and would require a ministerial order to become law. Read Full Story

Social networking sites have become the new front in the war against spam, according to security watchers.

In the six months leading up to March 2008, social networking sites saw a four-fold growth in the amount of spam on their network. At several major social networking sites, 30 per cent of new accounts created are automated fraudulent 'zombie' accounts, designed to be used for spam and other malicious attacks, according to anti-spam firm Cloudmark.

JF Sullivan, VP of marketing at Cloudmark, said the type of spam advertised through social networks is the same type as that advertised by email spam and punted by much the same people. "There's an implicit trust in social networking. People don't think they're going to be attacked with spam," Sullivan told El Reg. "People don't trust email anymore. Spammers are following peoples' online habits."

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Seven Nato nations have backed a new cyber defence centre in Estonia, which last year blamed Russia for weeks of attacks on its internet structure.

Germany, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Italy and Spain will staff and fund the hub in the Estonian capital Tallinn.

Estonia came under cyber attack in 2007 after its decision to remove the bronze statue of a Red Army soldier from the centre of Tallinn.

Moscow denied involvement in the flood of data which crashed computers.

"We have seen in Estonia that a cyber attack can swiftly become an issue of national security," Nato spokesman James Appathurai said after a signing ceremony in Brussels.

"Cyber attacks can cripple societies."

The US will initially send an observer to the project, which will have some 30 staff when fully operational in August.

The centre will provide research, consultation and training on the development of cyber defences for participating national governments.

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Should we have two internets asks Bill Thompson

Jonathan Zittrain's recent book, The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It, has spurred a lot of discussion both online and offline, with blog posts lauding his insights or criticising his over-apocalyptic imagination.

The book itself makes fascinating reading for those who have watched the network grow from its roots in the research community into today's global channel for communications, commerce and cultural expression.

And the distinction that Zittrain makes between computers and devices that are open for hacking, exploration and creative use and those which are locked down and limited is one that we can clearly see.

An iPhone and an Asus Eee PC are very different objects, and I can't imagine anyone scrawling 'this machine kills fascists' on their iPhone in homage to Woody Guthrie, while my son has just done this to his Asus.

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MySpace has won a $234m (£120m) legal judgement over junk messages sent to members of the social networking site.

Victory in the case was awarded to MySpace after Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines, the men behind the junk mail, failed to show up in court.

The judgement is thought to be the largest ever given against senders of unsolicited commercial e-mail.

However, anti-spam experts said MySpace had little chance of getting the cash it sought.

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A new type of identity fraud, which sees hackers tapping into voice-over IP telephony accounts, has been highlighted by a VoIP equipment maker.

Usernames and passwords from voice-over IP (VoIP) phone accounts are selling online for more than stolen credit cards, Newport Networks has found.

The information allows someone to use the telephone service for free.

Net telephony fraud is still in its infancy, with eavesdropping on calls being the most common security flaw.

Capturing accounts

But the move into stealing usernames and passwords which are routinely sent across the network when a call is made, is a worrying new trend thinks Dave Gladwin, vice president of products at Newport Networks.

"It is still at an embryonic stage but as voice adoption increases it becomes more of a problem and needs addressing," said Mr Gladwin.

The details are not sent as plain text but are encoded in such a way as to be "easily captured and unobscured", said Mr Gladwin.

Credit card details have been traded fairly openly online for some time and can be bought for around $12 (£6) each. VoIP account details fetch a slightly higher price, at $17 (£9), according to Mr Gladwin.

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Personal details of Facebook users could potentially be stolen, the BBC technology programme Click has found.

The popular social networking site allows users to add a variety of applications to their profile.

But a malicious program, masquerading as a harmless application, could potentially harvest personal data.

Facebook says users should exercise caution when adding applications. Any programs which violate their terms will be removed, the network said.

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U.S. telecommunications giant AT&T has claimed that, without investment, the Internet's current network architecture will reach the limits of its capacity by 2010.

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More than half of Europeans are now regular Internet users, 80% of them have broadband connections and 60% of public services in the EU are fully available online. Two thirds of schools and half of doctors make use of fast Internet connections, thanks to strong broadband growth in Europe. These are the findings of a Commission report on the results achieved so far with i2010, the EU's digital-led strategy for growth and jobs. The strategy, agreed in 2005, has led to a firm commitment to promoting ICT at EU and national levels. As of 2007, all Member States consider ICT development as one of the main achievements in their structural reform programmes. In parallel, the EU institutions have encouraged the building of a single market for online services and increased research funding. A single market for telecoms, promoting cross-border communication services, is, however, still in the making.

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This paper was written by Dr. Slavka Antonova and appeared in the International Journal of Communications Law and Policy

Abstract: The model of a global multistakeholder collaboration in Internet domain-name system management, as developed by U.S. government in 1998 and embedded in ICANN, held all the promises of a paradigm shift in global governance. Seven years later, the UN World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia (November 2005) adopted some of the vocabulary of the ICANN experiment and recognized the multistakeholder collaboration as a key organizational principle in global Internet governance. Yet, it reestablished the leading role of national governments and intergovernmental organizations, such as the ITU, in the regulation of the global Internet.

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As the global concern for cyber crime is upbeat, the need for cyber security in the country against the backdrop of the identification of Nigeria as the weakest link in the battle against such crime is the thrust of this discourse. How many fraudulent unsolicited mails do you receive daily? While for some it's just a few, for others, the mails come in torrents with some defying all logic.

That the obvious reason behind these mails is a ploy to defraud unsuspecting Nigerians does not make it any better. Welcome to the world of scammers who have perfected their game in the battle to fleece people off their hard earned money. Is the issue just tied to monetary acts alone? Recent events have shown that the world of cyber crime goes beyond raiding the treasure chest of people through Yahoo zee moves as the cyber crime is called in Nigeria, but has crossed the line into real growing concern that has the propensity to impact negatively on a nation's security base and economy.

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The argument of the seriousness of a cyber war on terror is still raging. However, the threats remain real and will likely continue. There are many new considerations which must be realized for the future to stop the impending war on cyber terrorism. The war on cyber terror is one that the world has never encountered before. Old technology and old defenses are obsolete.

The technology industry is rapidly changing and changing with it are the methods used by cyber terrorists. Prevention techniques must be dynamic and change as quickly as the technology does. The old computer security models, data processing, and auditing in use today are outdated. Cyber Terrorism is more difficult than other forms of terrorism. In the case of cyber terrorism, if the terrorist fails, he does not die. He can learn from his mistakes and ensure the success of his deeds in the future.

One of the unexpected problems that cyber terrorism has created is that the fear of an attack could possibly lead Americans to give up rights they would not normally relinquish. For example, the fact that many of the terrorists use cryptography in their communications is not a reason to ban this technology per se.

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At the Global IPv6 Summit in Beijing this week, executives from the Internet industry have come together to share bleak predictions about the future of the Internet. According to Tony Hain from router vendor Cisco, within three years, we'll be flat out of the addresses used in the current version 4 of the Internet Protocol. After that, "changes will come suddenly."

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A concerted international effort could see the end of websites that profit by selling images of child sex abuse, a leading action group has said.

The UK's Internet Watch Foundation conducted research to identify how many sites trade such images and concluded there are 2,755 such sites worldwide.

Of these, 80% are judged to be fully commercial operations.

The IWF said this "manageable" number could be eliminated if net firms, governments and police worked together.

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The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) and the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) presented the results [PDF] of a recent IPv6 survey at the ARIN XXI Public Policy Meeting in Denver on April 7th. The survey involved over 200 respondents from a blend of Government, commercial organizations (including ISPs and end users), educational institutions, associations, and other profit and non-profit entities. The purpose of the survey, conducted between March 10th and 24th, was to capture IPv6 penetration data in the ARIN region.

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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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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.

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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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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