On 24 and 25 February 2011 the European Commission, DG Home Affairs, organised a meeting on cyber crime in cooperation with the US government, Department of Justice, with representatives of the law enforcement community, registries and registrars. The basis of the discussion was the RAA due diligence recommendations (hence: the recommendations) as presented by LEAs in the past years during ICANN meetings. The meeting was constructive, surprising and fruitful. I give some background, but what I would like to stress here is what, in my opinion, could be a way forward after the meeting. more
Last week, I read Ed Falk's blog post where he commented on a possible solution to the spam problem. He himself was commenting on a study done by researchers out of the University of California where they discovered that credit card transactions for stuff bought in spamvertisements are handled by three companies: one in Azerbaijan, one in Denmark and one in the West Indies. Presumably, if security experts and law enforcement went after these companies, spammers would have their financial supply cut off. No money = no incentive to spam. more
While most people I know are at either VoiceCon or CTIA this week, this one is worth staying home for. Also, I'm sure all the Skype followers are focused today on the news about working with the iPhone -- and that IS a big story. However -- for very different reasons -- I'm sure you'll find this one of interest too. This was a front page story in today's Globe and Mail, and no doubt many other Canadian dailies... more
In the business world, there are two main paths a company can take with cybersecurity -- the reactive and the proactive approach. The problem with a purely reactive attitude is that it can easily put companies in constant firefighting mode. And for small companies with limited resources, this can turn out to be an increasingly uncomfortable place to be in.
With that in mind, experts today suggest proactive cybersecurity by monitoring suspicious activity and identifying risks before they turn into full-blown attacks. more
Internet crooks never cease to surprise me. The inventiveness in being bad is super. If these guys lent their thinking power to the economy, the economic crisis would be solved within a week. Today I ran into three brand new cyber security threats that were reported on. In one day. So I thought to share them with you. more
In March of 2018, abuse.ch, a non-profit cybersecurity organization in Switzerland, launched a project called URLhaus to collect and share URLs identified to be distributing malware. more
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win!" quote by Gandhi pretty much summarizes the evolution of the domain name monetization and development business. I have watched this business come of age for more than half a decade... In the beginning nobody cared... then when people started talking about how great it was, 'smart people' and the "legitimate web" laughed. Then the trucks with money showed up... A significant double-digit percentage of global Internet traffic is now owned by domain holders with generic names. So the fight is on. more
In the run-up to the 14th Internet Governance Forum in Berlin, Germany, 25 to 29 November, different groups are discussing best practices pertaining to specific internet governance policy questions. These groups are open and thrive on your input and experiences. Their findings will be presented at the IGF and published shortly after. The IGF Best Practice Forums intend to inform internet governance policy debates by drawing on the immense and diverse range of experience and expertise... more
As some of us are continuing to learn this week the Monster.com service has again been successfully hacked. According to a security bulletin posted on Monster.com on January 23rd, 2009, the intruder gained access to the user database, while no resumes were apparently compromised... As a user of Monster.com what I find incredibly upsetting about this situation is that I had to find out about this through a security blog. more
Global Payments, an Atlanta-based payment card processing firm, announced yesterday that they had suffered "unauthorized access into a portion of its processing system". Sometime in early March they uncovered the attack, and there are some indications that the breach occurred between January 21st and February 25th of this year... There are a number of unverified reports that a New York City street gang with Central American ties took control of "an administrative account that was not protected sufficiently". more
Last week, I commented on the the Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo username and password leak. The question we now ask is whether or not we are seeing an increased amount of spam from those services. On another blog, they were commenting that various experts were claiming that this is the case. more
In two weeks, final negotiations will begin on the UN's proposed Cybercrime Convention, a document which has elicited widespread concern from civil society, industry groups, and some states due to the serious risks it poses to human rights, including privacy and freedom of expression. Since 2022, GPD and other groups, including EFF, Human Rights Watch and Privacy International, have sought to alert stakeholders within the process to the need for substantial revisions... more
Earlier this year, the New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs, the US Federal Trade Commission, and the Australian CMA broke up a large fake drug spam ring known as Herbal Kings, run by New Zealander Lance Atkinson. The NZ government fined him NZ$108,000 (about US$80,000) which, while a substantial fine, seemed pretty small compared to the amount of money he must have made. But today, at the FTC's request a US judge fined Atkinson US$15.5 million, and got his US accomplice Jody Smith to turn over $800,000, including over $500,000 in an Israeli bank. more
In one of the first (if not the first) UDRP cases for .cat, the auto giant BMW appears to have filed a WIPO case over the BMW.cat domain name. Other prospective new TLD operators have tried to suggest in ICANN meetings that these new TLDs do not cause problems with cybersquatting or defensive registrations... Obviously, given the above WIPO case, that statement is false. more
Over the past few years, we have seen a plethora of over-hyped articles in the popular press and blogosphere crowing wrong-headedly about how 'email is dead'. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter, new and as-yet unproven technologies are the supposed death-knell for our old reliable friend, e-mail. I wrote about the rumours of email's death being exaggerated back in 2007 in response to such inanity. Since then, we've seen such a cornucopia of silliness of the 'Such & such is killing email' variety that Mark Brownlow compiled a bunch of articles, and their rebuttals at his excellent site... more
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