International News

IFW shut Down Australia's largest illegal streaming website

Thu, 05 May 2011 02:49:00 GMT

TWO hours before the NRL season kicked off, a young hacker was politely told to shut down his illegal website which had been streaming live matches - or face going to jail.

The NRLfixit.com.au website was started last season by a Rozelle youngster just out of high school.

In two days, "Liam" - as he wants to be known - had 6000 members and by the end of last season the number had grown to 12,000. He believed he would have tripled that this year.

Flushed with the success of his site, the young entrepreneur moved from amateur hacker to budding businessman and began looking for sponsors.

But NRL officials were not impressed.

"Organisations pay large sums of money for the rights to televise these matches," NRL spokesman John Brady said. "And, like any brand, we have to protect ourselves and our clients against piracy."

The NRL realised someone was streaming their games - but hunting down who, where and how was beyond their expertise. Enter private eye and cyber crime expert Ken Gamble.

What he found amazed him. The site was sourced back to the young hacker, a Wests Tigers supporter, in the heart of Balmain territory. "This was a smart kid with no formal training but an absolute computer genius," Mr Gamble said.

A team of cyber experts working for Mr Gamble tracked down 20-year-old Liam, living at home with his mum and dad at Rozelle.

Internet Fraud Watchdog and the International Association of Cybercrime Prevention will hold the 4th Regional Conference on Cybercrime and International Criminal Co-operation in Sydney on May 19 and 20.

(Original Link)

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/sydney-nsw/private-eye-puts-byte-on-illegal-rl-website/story-e6freuzi-1226024299129

Wild wild web a perfect place for fakes

Thu, 05 May 2011 02:48:00 GMT

THE image of a tsunami bearing down on the Japanese mainland was of biblical proportions.

It was also, to use Twitter terminology, an "epic #fail''.

It was fake.

It was five minutes of misspent time on Photoshop, a few Twitter and Facebook friends and their you have it: A horrific image of the Japanese tsunami being circulated among millions of people from distressed relatives to international news outlets.

This week Twitter - which has been used to broadcast everything from desperate messages of Egyptian revolutionaries to celebrity death tweets claiming the likes of Johnny Depp and Myley Cyrus had, wrongly, popped their clogs - turned five years old.

And although the web has made it possible for everyone to become their own publisher, it is the explosive growth of the micro blog along with social media behemoth Facebook which has pushed that self-published content to the four corners of the earth seemingly instantaneously.

Therein lies the problem, RMIT School of Business IT and Logistics' lecturer John Lenarcic said this week.

"I guess that's the biggest problem,'' Dr Lenarcic says from his university office in Melbourne.

"How do we know what we are seeing or reading is authentic?''

However, fake photos and misreported news that goes viral on the internet is as much a problem with the people that view the content as those that create it, Dr Lenarcic asserts.

"People have been telling stories for a long time,'' he says.

"You go to the pub or sit by the camp fire and that latent creativity would kick in.

"You go to the pub to hang out, it's not home or work so people have called it a 'third place' and so your expectations are different.

"But is Facebook or Twitter a third place?

"I don't think we have been able to figure that out yet.''

Confusing the problem even further, Dr Lenarcic says that humans have built up a lot of value around the written word - if we read it in the book or the newspaper then it must be true because editors and publishers have worked to verify the report or picture as being real.

And, Dr Lenarcic says, that "trust what is published'' mentality has transferred across to the internet despite the majority of content not being scrutinised in the same way.

University of Sydney digital cultures lecturer Chris Chesher said that bloggers, Twitter users and other "netizens'' were pushing out vast amounts of content and quickly and there was tension between them and traditional news outlets who had moved into the online space.

"Traditional news outlets are rushing to keep up with people on the internet,'' Dr Chesher says in light of news outlets claiming the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's son was killed this week.

"But the traditional media needs to slow down and verify their content.

"So there is the tension between bloggers and traditional media - at the moment they are both competing on speed but the internet will always win that competition.''

It's misplaced trust.

Dr Lenarcic compares the internet to America's Wild West.

"What we are in at the moment is a new frontier,'' he says.

"The internet is lawless like the Wild West was.''

And it's not just the virtual version of cattle thieves' tall stories told around the camp fire, the doctored photos and misinformed social media updates, which hark back to those lawless days.

Scam hunter Ken Gamble, a veteran private investigator who now works for the Internet Fraud Watchdog, deals in the more serious hoax content.

"[The internet] is a breeding ground for fake and fictitious material,'' Mr Gamble says.

"Traditionally, you had to send your story to the newspaper before it was published.

"You had to reveal your identity, now you don't need to do either.''

The inability to pin an identity to a piece of content means scammers have turned the internet into a fraudster's playground, Mr Gamble says.

Dr Lenarcic agrees that fraudulent activity is concerning, but anonymity shouldn't be regarded as all bad.

"Anonymity reminds me of the super hero and super villain characters - all of them have masks and alter egos,'' Dr Lenarcic explains.

"Look at Wikipedia, it's all anonymous.

"These entries can be positive or negative and can be hijacked at any time.

"But Wikipedia says it is self correcting - an anonymous 'villain' will make an entry which is wrong and someone, a `hero', will come along and correct it.''

It's illustrative of what Dr Lenarcic and many other internet commentators including American author Clay Shirky refer to as a type of web ethics.

That web ethics has often been preached in open source software communities where people who use the free software have an obligation to fix any bugs they find.

"You are expected to fix the bug, not just complain about the software having a bug,'' Dr Lenarcic says.

"It's the same in the real world - if you see a cigarette butt on the ground then you could do the community thing and put it in the bin or you could just stand there and complain about it.''

The university lecturer argues the same goes for errant content, there is no use complaining about it when everyone with an internet connect has the ability to correct it.

Sydney-based Dr Chesher explains that, like the real world, different parts of the internet have different ethics.

"It's not one place so just like there are school yard ethics and other types of ethics governing different places will live in, the internet is much the same,'' he says.

"And because of that I think ethics has to be sorted out at the coalface.''

Dr Lenarcic says Dr Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited as one of the founders of the internet, has been pushing for the creation of web sciences as a academic course in the same way natural and social sciences are being taught.

The study would focus on social anomalies on the web as well as looking at information ethics.

"Every time there is a new technology there is a set of ethics that pop up around it,'' Dr Lenarcic says.

"I say to my students that the Catholic church have 'new sins' because of technology.

"The church has listed drink driving as a mortal sin but that wouldn't have existed before the automobile was invented.''

Some of the formative ethics are seemlingly simple - and lift a lot from the bricks and mortar world.

"You have to have a moral imagination,'' Dr Lenarcic says.

"You have to ask yourself, 'How would I feel if I had loved ones in Japan and I saw a doctored photo of a tsunami?'

"It's goes back to the 'Do unto others as other do unto you'.''

It's Biblical ethics judging a faked act of god image

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/wild-wild-web-a-perfect-place-for-fakes/story-fn6e0s1g-1226031955732

Pinay model raises alarm on identity theft

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 08:35:00 GMT

The Philippines – home to the fifth "most engaged social networking audience" and the sixth largest Facebook population in the world — is also one of the many countries without a law to protect its netizens from online identity theft.

Identity theft occurs when someone uses your personal information without your permission, to commit fraud or other crimes. That is how the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas described identity theft, warning the public regarding online financial transactions as early as July 2009.

To date, the Philippines has no law that penalizes people guilty of identity theft. Most reports of identity theft in the country happen not only in social networking sites, but in banking sites as well.

GMA News reporter Julius Segovia said on Jessica Soho’s “State of the Nation" that ten Filipinos daily fall victim to identity theft, especially in the National Capital Region.

Victims of identity theft

Twenty-one year old model, entrepreneur, and blogger Kryz Uy was one of the many victims of identity theft. An anonymous user set-up a fake Kryz Uy account to sell clothes, purportedly from her; up to P8,000 was stolen from one of Uy’s followers.

"Everyone thought that I was scamming these people so I had to clear my name. But then no matter how I tried to report it on Facebook, wala pa rin," said Uy. She went as far as reporting the incident to authorities, but to no avail.

In 2010, Gilbert Climaco, a program director and news anchor of the Radio Mindanao Network, was a victim of identity theft after a fake Facebook account under his name was used to extort money. Climaco, who back then did not yet have an account in any social networking site, said that the fake account "created a lot of mess in my life."

One bank depositor, who refused to reveal his identity, lost P87,000 when an unknown cyber-thief succeeded in transferring money from his account to an untraceable account. “Masama lang ang loob ko kasi walang magawa ang bangko," he said.

Anti-identity theft legislation

In 2008 alone in the United States, despite having several statutes in place to protect citizens from the crime, over 10 million people fell victim to credit card identity theft.

A law protecting internet users from internet-related forgery and fraud is now in the works in the Philippine Congress. If House Bill 4115 or the Data Privacy Act of 2011, is passed, it will "ensure that the personal information and communications system in the government and in the private sectors are secure and protected," according to the House of Representatives website. The bill is on its third and final reading.

While the bill is awaiting final approval from the House of Representatives, authorities urge Filipinos to be extra vigilant, especially when it comes to their automated teller machine transactions and even with their social networking site accounts.

http://ph.news.yahoo.com/pinay-model-raises-alarm-identity-theft-20110414-180756-019.html

Telcos in secret talks to stamp out online piracy

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 15:15:00 GMT

AUSTRALIAN telcos have quietly begun negotiating with copyright holders to stamp out online piracy.

This comes as Hollywood interests pursue a landmark legal bid in the Federal Court to hold ISPs to account for content theft.

Industry peak body the Communications Alliance has been in secret talks with the Australian Content Industry Group to fix the problem since before the last major ruling in the trial was handed down last month.

The ACIG represents major rights holder bodies in Australia including APRA-AMCOS, the Australian Recording Industry Association, Microsoft, Music Industry Piracy Investigations and the Australian Publishers Association.

Communications Alliance chief John Stanton revealed the negotiations late last week.

An ACIG spokeswoman, MIPI general manager Sabiene Heindl, confirmed that the ACIG was negotiating with telcos.

"Representatives of the ACIG are in discussions with Communications Alliance about an industry-led model to discourage illegal file-sharing of content and facilitate and encourage legal content consumption online," she said.

"Those discussions are continuing."

The Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft, which acted on behalf of 34 entertainment companies to bring the copyright claims against iiNet in Australia, said it had been aware of the talks but had not participatedso far.

AFACT chief Neil Gane said it came as no surprise that the alliance had chosen to reveal the talks after the ruling.

"We were aware of these discussions," Mr Gane said.

"We are not surprised the Comms Alliance seeks to raise discussions that were held pre-judgment. We have no doubt all rights holders will be carefully considering their position since the decision."

Mr Stanton declined to reveal the alliance's legal view on last month's ruling.

"I have read the judgment. I have my own impressions of what it means but I am not providing legal advice to my members about it at this stage," he said.

In a two-to-one ruling, the Federal Appeal Court upheld preliminary trial judge Denis Cowdroy's decision that iiNet could not be held responsible for acts

of copyright infringement by its customers.

The internet industry celebrated it as a victory but AFACT's lawyers were also buoyant by the ruling, arguing that appeal judges overturned crucial arguments put forward by Justice Cowdroy.

The group has been trying to convince the court that iiNet authorised its customers to use file-sharing software to breach copyright by it refusing to send them infringement notices prepared and sent by AFACT investigators.

According to AFACT, its appeal primarily failed on a technicality over the quality of the notices and appeal judge John Nicholas erred in applying long-established copyright infringement tests.

AFACT has revealed it would apply for special leave to appeal the ruling to the High Court.

(Original Link)

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/telcos-in-secret-talks-to-stamp-out-online-piracy/story-e6frgakx-1226029669034

Cybercrime treaty doomed to fail: Kaspersky

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 04:00:00 GMT

THE global treaty to fight cybercrime is doomed to fail, says Eugene Kaspersky, chief executive of Russian-based IT security vendor Kaspersky Lab.

The Gillard government is currently assessing whether to join the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime, with public consultations having just closed.

While the government plans to give police new powers to order the collection of real-time network traffic data and to rapidly secure evidence held on computer systems, it has stopped short of agreeing to allow real-time interception on behalf of foreign powers.

It will, however, amend telecommunications intercept laws to permit the collection of "prospective data" for foreign law enforcement purposes where the nation has made a mutual assistance request approved by the attorney-general.

Mr Kaspersky says the cybercrime treaty is fundamentally flawed, because non-European and non-English speaking countries will not participate.

"I have been arguing with the European commissioner about Article 32B, which allows cross-border access to IT systems, for many years," he said.

"I believe Russia, China and other Asian, South American and African countries will not join the club; there's not such a big level of trust in those regions.

"And I hardly believe the US would allow Chinese police to have access to American IT systems, nor Brazil allow French police access to Brazilian systems. This will not work."

Instead, Mr Kaspersky has called for the establishment of an "internet interpol", which liaises with national police forces and manages international crime investigations. "The bad news is, it will take many years for governments to agree on an effective international cyber police force," he said.

"It's a project on the level of (creating) the United Nations.

"Governments are aware and very scared of (the escalating) IT problems of fraud, crime and sabotage but they still don't know what to do because the problem is very deep and very big."

Mr Kaspersky was in Melbourne last week for the start of the Formula One Grand Prix season. His company is a sponsor of the Scuderia Ferrari team.

Kaspersky Lab has released a special Ferrari-themed edition of its Internet Security suite, packaged with a video driving simulator that allows users to test themselves on all the Grand Prix race tracks. Mr Kaspersky said the idea was to have a bit of fun and promote visibility of the security software.

"Well, boys are boys," he said. "And IT security is like a game, a serious and long-term game.

"It's an interesting industry, because we're not just fighting with our commercial rivals, we are also fighting with the bad guys, racing to keep ahead."

The cyber-threat landscape was becoming ever more complicated, Mr Kaspersky said, with traditional criminals now using personal data posted on social networks to commit real-world crimes.

(Original Link)

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/cybercrime-treaty-doomed-to-fail-kaspersky/story-e6frgakx-1226029670007

WikiLeaks cyberwar: hackers planning revenge attack on Amazon

Mon, 13 Dec 2010 12:45:00 GMT

A group of computer hackers are planning to attack Amazon the online retailer.

Last week the WikiLeaks website was dropped by a server owned by Amazon following apparent pressure from the US government.

The hackers are now preparing to exact their revenge. A message posted on the hacker’s Twitter account said: “TARGET: WWW.AMAZON.COM LOCKED ON!!!”

The group of computer hackers, calling themselves "Anonymous" earlier said that they were targeting Paypal, the internet payments company.

One of the hackers told the Daily Telegraph they were attacking the website's payment mechanism, and warned that Mastercard 's payment system could be next. The group has previously attacked the websites of Visa, Amazon and Mastercard but has not previously tried to disrupt a payment system.

The hackers decided to attack the Paypal website after it suspended payments to the Wikileaks fundraising account.

The group has already attacked the websites of Visa, Mastercard and the Swedish government.
One of the hackers said: "We attacked VISA and MasterCard's front end website, which is the page you see when you load visa.com or mastercard.com. We did not attack the payment mechanism for those two, but we did so with Paypal."

"It is definitely an information war. The core principle behind it is [that] information is free, governments keep information to themselves, Wikileaks releases them to the general public and the war occurs."

A spokesman for Paypal insisted that the site had not been disrupted: "As far as we are aware there hasn't been any further impact no the site and it remains fully functional."

Earlier the attackers brought down the official Swedish government website in revenge for accusations of rape in the country against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

The official site, regeringen.se, was offline for several hours overnight and only a message saying the site could not be reached was visible.

The actions so far have been essentially attacks by volume, known as DDoS or distributed denial of service, in which the target site is hit with massively increased numbers of visitors with the intention of exceeding its capabilities and forcing it to crash.

In this case, hundreds of volunteers have downloaded something called a botnet, which aids the distribution of the command to attack the site. The volunteers wait until they are given a signal on an internet chatroom, before launching the massed attack.

The attacks are illegal in Britain and carry a maximum sentence of two years.

Carole Theriault, a senior security consultant at Sophos, a computer security firm, said: "If the big companies weren't locking down their information before, they're definitely doing it now.
"This is really unprecedented and Amazon could be next."

She added: "Hacking is illegal and it's not just the companies which are the victims of this, it's also the people who are trying to use their services to shop and the sellers of those items who can't sell them.
However she said it was unlikely, although not impossible, for people's credit card details to be unearthed by such attacks.

"Data held by financial services companies is extremely safe and it's in their interests to keep it that way."
The group of "hacktivists" calling themselves Anonymous posted a blog setting out its aims as campaiging for free speech.

The post read: "Hello World. We are Anonymous. What you do or do not know about us is irrelevant. We have decided to write to you, the media, and all citizens of the free world at large to inform you of the message, our intentions, potential targets, and our ongoing peaceful campaign for freedom.

"The message is simple: freedom of speech. Anonymous is peacefully campaigning for freedom of speech everywhere in all forms. Freedom of speech for: the internet, for journalism and journalists, and citizens of the world at large. Regardless of what you think or have to say; Anonymous is campaigning for you."

By Andy Bloxham, and Steven Swinford 4:31PM GMT 09 Dec 2010

Source - The Telegraph UK

Internet Piracy dealt a blow in the US

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 00:05:00 GMT

Web Censorship Bill Sails Through Senate Committee

By Sam Gustin November 18, 2010 Wired.com

Introduction

Article found on Wired.com recently shows that the US Government is moving to crack down on Internet piracy. For too long behind freedom of speech and other laws, pirates have been able to run rampant over the net in the US. This article outlines Congress' decision, also giving players like Internet Fraud Watchdog greater authority to protect your IP.

Who says Congress never gets anything done?

On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approved a bill that would give the Attorney General the right to shut down websites with a court order if copyright infringement is deemed “central to the activity” of the site — regardless if the website has actually committed a crime. The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) is among the most draconian laws ever considered to combat digital piracy, and contains what some have called the “nuclear option,” which would essentially allow the Attorney General to turn suspected websites “off.

COICA is the latest effort by Hollywood, the recording industry and the big media companies to stem the tidal wave of internet file sharing that has upended those industries and, they claim, cost them tens of billions of dollars over the last decade.

The content companies have tried suing college students. They’ve tried suing internet startups. Now they want the federal government to act as their private security agents, policing the internet for suspected pirates before making them walk the digital plank.

Many people opposed to the bill agree in principle with its aims: Illegal music piracy is, well, illegal, and should be stopped. Musicians, artists and content creators should be compensated for their work. But the law’s critics do not believe that giving the federal government the right to shut down websites at will based upon a vague and arbitrary standard of evidence, even if no law-breaking has been proved, is a particularly good idea. COICA must still be approved by the full House and Senate before becoming law.

A vote is unlikely before the new year.

Among the sites that could go dark if the law passes: Dropbox, RapidShare, SoundCloud, Hype Machine and any other site for which the Attorney General deems copyright infringement to be “central to the activity” of the site, according to Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group that opposes the bill. There need not even be illegal content on a site — links alone will qualify a site for digital death. Websites at risk could also theoretically include p2pnet and pirate-party.us or any other website that advocates for peer-to-peer file sharing or rejects copyright law, according to the group.

In short, COICA would allow the federal government to censor the internet without due process.

The mechanism by which the government would do this, according to the bill, is the internet’s Domain Name System (DNS), which translates web addresses into IP addresses. The bill would give the Attorney General the power to simply obtain a court order requiring internet service providers to pull the plug on suspected websites.

Scholars, lawyers, technologists, human rights groups and public interest groups have denounced the bill. Forty-nine prominent law professors called it “dangerous.” (pdf.) The American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch warned the bill could have “grave repercussions for global human rights.”

Several dozen of the most prominent internet engineers in the country — many of whom were instrumental in the creation of the internet — said the bill will “create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation.” Several prominent conservative bloggers, including representatives from RedState.com, HotAir.com, The Next Right and Publius Forum, issued a call to help stop this “serious threat to the Internet.”

And Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the world wide web, said, “Neither governments nor corporations should be allowed to use disconnection from the internet as a way of arbitrarily furthering their own aims.” He added: “In the spirit going back to Magna Carta, we require a principle that no person or organization shall be deprived of their ability to connect to others at will without due process of law, with the presumption of innocence until found guilty.”

Critics of the bill object to it on a number of grounds, starting with this one: “The Act is an unconstitutional abridgment of the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment,” the 49 law professors wrote. “The Act permits the issuance of speech suppressing injunctions without any meaningful opportunity for any party to contest the Attorney General’s allegations of unlawful content.” (original emphasis.)

Because it is so ill-conceived and poorly written, the law professors wrote, “the Act, if enacted into law, will not survive judicial scrutiny, and will, therefore, never be used to address the problem (online copyright and trademark infringement) that it is designed to address. Its significance, therefore, is entirely symbolic — and the symbolism it presents is ugly and insidious. For the first time, the United States would be requiring Internet Service Providers to block speech because of its content.”

The law professors noted that the bill would actually undermine United States policy, enunciated forcefully by Secretary of State Clinton, which calls for global internet freedom and opposes web censorship. “Censorship should not be in any way accepted by any company anywhere,” Clinton said in her landmark speech on global internet freedom earlier this year. She was referring to China. Apparently some of Mrs. Clinton’s former colleagues in the U.S. Senate approve of internet censorship in the United States.

To be fair, COICA does have some supporters in addition to sponsor Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vermont) and his 17 co-sponsors including Schumer, Specter, Grassley, Gillibrand, Hatch, Klobuchar, Coburn, Durbin, Feinstein, Menendez and Whitehouse. Mark Corallo, who served as chief spokesperson for former Attorney General John Ashcroft and as spokesman for Karl Rove during the Valerie Plame affair, wrote Thursday on The Daily Caller: “The Internet is not at risk of being censored. But without robust protections that match technological advances making online theft easy, the creators of American products will continue to suffer.”

“Counterfeiting and online theft of intellectual property is having devastating effects on industries where millions of Americans make a living,” wrote Corallo, who now runs a Virginia-based public relations firm and freely admits that he has “represented copyright and patent-based businesses for years.” “Their futures are at risk due to Internet-based theft.”

The Recording Industry Association of America, which represents the major record labels, praised Leahy for his work, “to insure [sic] that the Internet is a civilized medium instead of a lawless one where foreign sites that put Americans at risk are allowed to flourish.”

Over the course of his career, Leahy has received $885,216 from the TV, movie and music industries, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Source - Wired.com
Original Article