Month: December 2004

The Chinese antivirus police team will visit the Kaspersky Labs offices in Moscow next week to discuss virus development.

“China has worked effectively in fighting virus writers,” said Natalya Kaspersky, chief executive of Kaspersky Labs, on Thursday. “They are much more active than anyone. They have special antivirus police that co-operates with industry. They want to learn more and I think that’s a good practice. They regularly hire people and really seem to care about viruses.”

But she added that hi-tech crime police in other countries are failing to perform as well as the Chinese in hunting virus writers. “European police have realised the problem, but don’t know what to do about it because it’s a virtual problem. I think they have a lot of work to do.”

Kaspersky said she wanted her company to work more closely with government and police forces around the world. “We are very proud that we caught one virus writer,” she said. “But the sentence was something like [a fine of] $300. It was the first case of its kind. The problem for us is that in Russian law, you have to prove the damage someone has done. How could you find a witness to prove someone started an attack?”

The UK’s National Hi-Tech Crime Unit is dedicated to fighting organised online crime, but currently individual users may only report isolated virus attacks to their local police station. Russia’s counterpart to the NHTCU is its Ministry of Internal Affairs K Department.

Last week, security lobbyist EURIM said it was pushing the government to employ IT professionals as special constables. The group said that the proposed Serious Organised Crime Agency should be a central point of contact for computer crimes.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39180202,00.htm

Speaking at the ‘Crime and Policing in Malaysia’ forum at Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) in Penang, Othman said with the fast moving pace in information technology (IT), it was important for all parties to work together.

He added when crimes were investigated, physical evidence such as fingerprints, marked bills, DNA or video footage are collected but in cyberspace, global networks lacked effective identification mechanisms.

“Therefore, it is important for the police to learn from the private sector about intrusion attempts and susceptibilities,” said Othman.

http://penang.thestar.com.my/content/news/2004/12/7/9550869.asp

In the statement, the company rapped the media, as well as Internet monitoring company Netcraft. “We are astonished by the enormous resonance generated by the “Make love not spam” campaign,” the statement read. “With this campaign we intended to raise a new impulse in the antispam discussion, and therefore create awareness for the big economic and societal problems caused by spam. The campaign has reached its goal and thus will be stopped.”

The company forcefully denied it launched any denial-of-service attacks on spammers and that it had taken two Chinese Web sites offline.

The statement continued: “In opposition to media reports to the contrary, we did not attempt any denial-of-service. We forcefully rebut a report by Netcraft referring to two spam servers having been disabled by our screensaver.” At the point of time of the Netcraft measurement on December 1st, 2004, both spam servers were not on the target list of the screensaver.

Also, the screensaver’s website has not been hacked as reported by F-Secure. “This has been acknowledged by F-Secure itself.”

This decision comes about a week after the “Make love not spam” screensaver was launched. The tool was taken offline on Friday, but at the time Lycos claimed that the tool would soon be back online. The downloadable screensaver uses the idle processing power of users’ computers to slow down bandwidth that connects to spammers’ Web sites.

“Things have changed,” said a Lycos UK representative on Monday. He said that the company had reviewed “Make love not spam” before deciding not to bring it back.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-5479582.html