Category: News

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.

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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.

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The request has apparently been welcomed by commissioner of the Metropolitan police Sir John Stevens.

“I think we should be using special constables,” said chairman of EURIM Brian White, MP. “IT managers could be given special powers. If they were trained in evidence gathering, they could report straight to the Crown Prosecution Service. Secure crime scenes and give records to court, for example.”

The recommendations follow findings earlier this year that only 240 people were qualified to work in digital forensics and evidence recovery. EURIM is proposing to increase the number of skilled police officers patrolling the cyber world.

White said that legislation alone was not enough to fight cybercrime, and more had to be done to improve the level of skilled police for the Internet. As part of EURIM’s proposals, White added that the UK needed better methods of reporting cybercrime because local police stations were ill-equipped to handle the task.

EURIM also proposed that some of the barriers to becoming a special constable should be removed, especially for IT specialists.

“One of the things you need to be [to join the special constables] is physically fit,” said Philip Virgo, secretary general for EURIM. “There would probably be lots of people who could monitor Internet chat rooms who couldn’t police the town on a Friday night. There are lots of boundaries to this that don’t need to be there.”

EURIM also called for IT specialists to contribute ideas for Internet policing, as the debate for what role the Serious Organised Crime Agency will play will begin over the next few weeks.

EURIM said it wanted to use the opportunity to ensure that people had a centralised point of contact when they needed to report a cybercrime.

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The controversial move is designed to use the idle processing power of a computer to slow down the response times from spammers’ Web sites.

“Lycos has been trying to position itself in the fight against spam,” said Wessel Van Rensburg, product manager of communications for Lycos. It aims to use our community to fight spam. It uses idle computer power and sends requests to spam sites.

On its Web site, Lycos, which claims to have an army of more than 66,000 computers, says it has already attacked several Web sites, slowing one down by 85 percent of its operating speed. The software is open to Windows and Mac users.

The company said that when the screensaver is active it displays the location and URL of the sites users’ PCs are attacking, and that Lycos decides the Web sites it will attack.

A spokesman for the company said: “This gives Internet users the opportunity to hit spammers where it hurts. Sending spam is not a minor misdemeanour, as spam causes billions of pounds of damage to the economy. This is why we are upping the ante in the fight against those responsible for spam.”

But DDoS attacks are illegal in a many countries and some organisations have criticised the move. Steve Linford, director of non-profit anti-spam organisation Spamhaus, has dedicated the last eight years of his life to fighting spammers. He said that Lycos has failed to think the idea through. “It’s irresponsible of Lycos to put its name to it because it lends legitimacy to [DDoS] attacks,” said Linford. “Directing traffic is part of the degradation of the Internet we are trying to stop.”

On its Web log, security company F-Secure also warned users away from the idea.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/security/0,39020375,39175487,00.htm

They come, stay a few years and move on because, ultimately, we can’t pay what the industry pays for talent,” Larkin said, adding that the bureau also has experienced difficulties with keeping pace with employees’ training needs.

Because of those shortcomings, Larkin said, the I3C spent the past four years forging partnerships with the biggest names in the tech industry to share expertise, coordinate on intelligence and develop best practices and protocols for fighting cyber-crime.

Originally formed as partnership between the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C) to fight online fraud, Larkin said the unit had to evolve to keep up with the rapidly changing face of crime on the Internet.

Larkin discussed several major highlights over the years, including “Operation Web Snare” in August, which led to the arrests or convictions of more than 150 individuals and the return of 117 criminal complaints and indictments.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1733838,00.asp