Music downloading still rampant

John Hillman reports on the findings of a new survey by UK Music, showing that young people are still taking big risks when it comes to free music

Malware threats don’t appear to be stopping young people from illegal downloading.Why? So it may be illegal and it might destroy your computer but here’s the thing, according to one respondent:

“It was my parent’s computer, so if anyone was going to get in trouble, it wasn’t going to be me. Excellent.”

There you have it, 61% of respondents said that still they downloaded music through peer-to-peer networks, and this despite the popularity of new sites such as Spotify.

The survey looked at 14-24 year olds and was carried out by the University of Hertfordshire on behalf of UK Music.

The dangers of P2P file sharing are that you are basically opening your computer up for others to access, without knowing who they are.

When you consider that 70 of the world’s most popular websites hosted malicious content or contained a link to sites that did it’s pretty obvious that your child’s file sharing activities, even on well known sites, can put your family’s digital privacy in danger.

One of the safest precautions is the addition of good family protection software that cblocks your children from accessing inappropriate content online and restricts the amount of time they can actually spend online.

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Image Credit: Jsome1

Australian hacker pandemic

The latest arrest of an Adelaide hacker is really just the tip of the iceberg says John Hillman.

News today an Australian hacker has been charged with infecting over 3,000 computers, in an attempt to capture banking and credit card data, will not come as a surprise to the Australian Computer Society.

Neither will the fact that he has been charged with creating a botnet of 74,000 computers. This was so that he could bombard systems around the world with unwanted web traffic.

Australia is in the grip of a wave of cyber-crime. Recent data revealed that the problem down-under is so great that you are now more likely to become a victim of cyber crime than burglary, assault or robbery.

Personally that’s no bad thing; forced to make a choice between having someone steal money from my account or coming face-to-face with a burglar at 3 a.m. I’m sure that most of us would choose the former. But it does highlight just how prevalent the problem has become.

Even though this man now faces being sentenced for up to 10 years each for each of his multiple crimes, the fact that he did it suggest that the possible gains from such activities outweigh the risks, in the criminal’s mind at least. Police believe that his arrest will soon lead to many others.

Things are so bad that the ACS’s Chairman, Kumar Parakala, recently said that cyber-crime in Australia was endangering their digital economy and had become:

“A major impediment to our further growth in this area, and requires a corresponding investment by Government and commercial interests to help Australians increase and maintain confidence in online transactions.”

This follows from last June when a major tax-refund scam targeted Australian taxpayers, directing them to a replica tax office website in an attempt to gain their personal information, in an activity known as phishing.

The problem has been caused, according to the ACS, by a general level of ignorance about cyber-security amongst the government, business community and the general public, making them soft targets for the organised criminal activities of the gangs. It is, said Parakala:

“…an unfortunate by-product of high speed, always on, internet services.”

Security software would go a long way to reducing these attacks by preventing hackers from accessing your PC and warning you when you are visiting bogus phishing websites.

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Image Credit: u07ch

Cybercrime- alternative career choice?

Pavla Tolonen wonders if we’ll all survive.

As we get richer, lazier and more likely to surrender in a fight due to our sugar and carb-infested existence, we are also more prone to complain online and avoid real combat in any way possible. This behaviour, apparently, may also apply to actual warfare.

Governments across the globe have no doubt already solidified a selection of cybercrime policies, but now reports are trickling in suggesting that real war conflict may be settled online.

Now, we’re not talking about Mikhail Saakashvili taking on Dmitry Medvedev in World of Warcraft or Command & Conquer, but a fully-fledged attack on global databases, and they say it has already begun.

This month’s DDOS (denial-of-service) attacks on micro-blogging site Twitter showed how significantly a global network of millions of users can be disabled in a mere matter of seconds. Yet, still, experts are cavorting in the exuberance of cloud computing, in which users store data online.

Fair enough, it may be efficient and probably quite safe, but where are all the users who cry about user’s rights and the horrible tentacles of big brother. Surely keeping all your important documents on a foreign server far away from your own reach is simply you handing them over, nonchalantly hoping they will never be accessed and tampered with. Don’t be fooled, free email accounts really do have a price – they tax your prerogative.

To be fair, cloud computing is certainly an effective way to share software and interoffice documents, but as service providers increase their capacity to uphold more facilities online, we should not entirely follow by keeping all our activities on their server.

Service providers do not ultimately owe you anything as you are a free consumer, therefore you are entrusting them with your information with no real leverage. As you owe them for the service, they can take the right upon themselves to control the system, and all your information.

Of course email account providers like Yahoo, Hotmail and GoogleMail guarantee your personal details, but the bigger their data bases become, and the more they move towards comprehensive cloud computing, the higher the risk is that somebody attempts to attack them for it.

So with computing, just like anything else, remember to spread the risk over several sources. Buy an external hard-drive (or at least a USB stick), invest in more than one email address and keep any important printed files at home.

Image credit: tnarik

Cybercrime- alternative career choice?

While the global economy still reels from the effects of the recession, it seems that some unemployed IT specialists are turning in cybercrime.. Murali Podila investigates.

In the wake of the discovery that a 130m credit and debit cards have been stolen in USA, researchers at the University of Brighton have concluded that there has been a dramatic increase in cybercrime over the recent years. This is backed up by recent statistics from the Internet Security threat report 2008 that show a 468% increase in computer viruses between 2007 and 2008.

The report also highlights an alarming increase in India, China, Brazil and Russia. Brazil, Russia and China are considered to be world leaders in cybercrime, whilst there has been a sizeable 50 fold increase in cybercrime in India. This increase has been due to low salaries and high turnover in the IT industry in India and also an increase in call center cybercrime. This involves hacking into the banks and then taking out money.

There are many ways to commit cybercrime. A popular way is a Denial of Service (DoS) attack that targets a website or web server by sending more traffic to it than it can handle. An ‘upside’ of DoS attacks is that they don’t steal any private information, which is where malware comes in. Malware are things such as viruses, worms, Trojans. This usually involves an executable file being replicated on a network thus causing things like deletion of important files.

Of all methods of cybercrime, the most recent and profitable is by using things like spyware, botnets and keystroke loggers. There are many ways that spyware can be profitable, the main way being spam and popups ads. Another worrying method is to gather bank account information or passwords by using key loggers.

Although there has been an increase in virus detection and protection, human error is still one of the major reasons why there are so many cybercrimes occurring.

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Image credit: Martin Kingsley

Jessica Biel most dangerous online celebrity

A new report from McAfee has announced that US actress Jessica Biel is now the most dangerous celebrity when it comes to searching for related content online. But to many Brits this will come as quite a shock, says John Hillman , as over here we simply don’t know her well enough, or do we?

After a year in which Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie looked unassailable, a surprise newcomer has emerged to claim the rather dubious honour of “world’s most dangerous online celebrity”.

Jessica Biel has been named in McAfee’s annual report as the celebrity whose search results are most likely to lead you to a site containing malware.

Likewise, if you look at the figures for the UK alone, it emerges that local celebrity Jordan is the most dangerous name to search for here.

It appears that anyone looking for Biel related content has a staggering one-in-five chance of landing on a page that will attempt to attack your computer.

This incredibly high figure shows us that online criminals have identifies Biel as a serious traffic generator and are using her to propagate online threats. McAfee’s report states that:

“Cybercriminals are star watchers, too. They latch onto popular celebrities to encourage the download of malicious software in disguise.”

So what do we know about Jessica Biel and why is she suddenly more popular than the Brangelina axis? She is the star of such cinematic classics as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (remake/tribute/whatever), I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry and Summer Catch.

Judging by the films she’s made and the type of audience they attract, and also by the way she looks, it is safe to say that this report should serve as a warning to all parents with teenage sons to make sure that their home PC is fully protected from threats. I could be wrong but I don’t think she’s the type of actress your grandmother will be Googling very often.

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Image Credit: Maggiejumps

Council crash

Schadenfreude is not the most attractive thing in the world, says John Hillman, but sometimes you just can’t help yourself.

As we scour the world to bring you news of the latest virus outbreaks it’s not often that we come across a story that, dare we say it, might bring a smile to the face of the average person on the street.

But anyone in the UK who has rushed back from the shops, one minute over their allotted parking time, to find an intransigent uniformed council official smugly attaching a parking ticket to their car and grinning at them as they hopelessly plead for mercy, can’t help but chuckle at the plight of the Ealing Council worker who plugged a virus infected memory stick into his office PC and caused 1,838 of them to be lost.

However, having indulged my inner Jeremy Clarkson, the story in today’s Guardian highlights just how vulnerable even large scale organisations allow themselves to become by not making sure that they are protected with robust anti-virus software.

The infected memory stick unleashed a wave of chaos throughout the council’s computer system. Phone lines were brought down and internal communications made impossible. It cost Ealing over £500,000 in lost revenue, from lost library fines to uncollected rents, with a staggering £90,000 from the unpaid parking tickets alone.

The Tory run council has stated that it managed to protect frontline services and deal with the problem quickly and efficiently. However, £500,000 is going to leave a big hole in their finances – one which they’re going to have to fix. So how do you think they’ll do that? By increasing the number of traffic wardens perhaps? Next time I go to Ealing I think I’ll be taking the bus (sorry Jeremy).

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Image credit: Paul & Aline

Wordpress hit by online attacks

Peter Moore looks at the news that Wordpress has become the latest victim of online hackers

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This weekend Wordpress, one of the most popular open source blogging platforms, revealed that old versions of its software had been attacked by a potentially dangerous worm.

A statement released on Wordpress’ official blog noted that:

“Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink structure, makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you look at users page, attempts to clean up after itself, then goes quiet so you never notice while it inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts.”

The appearance of the worm alarmed a worldwide network of Wordpress users, which includes millions of bloggers as well as organisations such as Ebay, the Daily Telegraph and Downing Street.

This latest attack suggests that Wordpress has become a victim of its own success. Wordpress blogging software is free to download while its infrastructure has been built by a global network of coders, making it an easy and obvious target for determined hackers.

To counter the growing threat posed by these hackers, Wordpress includes vital security updates in each of its new versions, which appear continuously throughout the year.

Each of these updates help to shut security holes, but as the code is open source (freely available to be viewed and developed) hackers can easily access it, study it and use this knowledge to target weak areas of coding with dangerous worms.
Writing in the Guardian, Charles Arthur speculated:

“Some people are already comparing it to Windows: such a big target that any attack is bound to hit some big fish, and plenty of little ones. And how many people have enough control or interest in their blog to go to the trouble of cleaning up? Windows botnets tell you what the situation is like on Windows. Spam comments tell you how things are in terms of cleaning up comments. And what about cleaning up the hacked content of your blog?“

This latest attack is being considered a vital moment in the emergence of Wordpress as an important ‘building block’ of the web. Over the weekend, hackers have proven that the Wordpress infrastructure is still dangerously fragile and the question remains – could this be a fatal flaw in the open source plan.

A list of ‘Things You Need to Know’ about this latest Wordpress attack has been published on Lorelle’s Wordpress blog.

Pidgeon beats Telkom broadband

Pavla Tolonen joins the bandwagon for pidgeon protests against slow internet transfer speeds

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The South African financial services provider Unlimited has beaten their internet provider Telkom’s ADSL transfer speeds by sending a 4GB memory stick across 60 miles attached to a pidgeon.
When the pidgeon named Winston arrived from its two hour trek from Howick to Hillcrest, the online file transfer had reached four per cent, far underperforming the bird.

Kevin Rolfe, Head of Information Technology at the Unlimited Group agreed the 11-month-old pidgeon was obviously vulnerable to threats like bad weather conditions and hawks, but said the company were willing to take their chances regarding the new file transfer system.

The company hopes to further improve transfer speeds, arguing that Winston’s trainers could probably teach him to do the same journey in 45 minutes.

Telkom has denied any responsibility regarding the slow transfer speeds displayed by Unlimited and told the BBC they had tried to offer the company solutions for this but none had been accepted.
Meanwhile over 300 eager followers in South Africa tuned into the activity via Twitter and 1,357 became fans of Winston the pidgeon on Facebook.

The official website for Winston the pidgeon www.pigeonrace2009.co.za, features regular updates from the bird’s blog, on which he posts topics concerning his existence as a pidgeon. The race could also be followed live online at www.ustream.tv.
Winston also states the rules of Pigeonrace2009 on the site. These include “no cats allowed” and “birdseed must not have any performance enhancing seeds within.”

His victory has been keenly embraced online, with most of the media covering the story and tweeters flocking to congratulate the bird for its feat against Telkom.

Some have even created tributes to the pidgeon, joining the criticism towards a lack of inefficient internet access, which South Africa hopes will improve after three new fibre optic cables are delivered to the continent.

Image credit: Réne (and then some)