Month: March 2009

Categories
End User internet security

Online identity theft cost USA $48Bn in 2008

I was amazed to read in a press release by Anti Virus firm AVG that online identity theft lead to $48Bn worth of fraud in 2008 in the USA alone. This was part of a press release issued by the company today regarding its new Identity Protection product.

You can read the press release yourself but this is certainly topical for me having only last week attended the ISPA Parliamentary Advisory Forum on ecrime. The scale of the activity clearly makes it worthy of its own specialist blog rather than just getting the occasional post in mine.

I think I will follow up with a top ten security tips for safe use of the internet. Many of these tips will be obvious and just involve a little discipline on the part of individuals. More anon.

Categories
Business internet ofcom

Ofcom gives BT green light for fibre investment

Ofcom effectively gave BT the go ahead today for a £1.5Bn investment in a fibre network to provide up to 100Mbps internet access to homes in certain areas. By removing any regulatory barriers that might constrain BT from charging free market pricing for the fibre services Ofcom has set an environment that makes the BT business case for the investment workable.

BT has been involved in a high profile lobbying excercise to get this decision since around the time of the Caio Report last year.

I welcome this move though many people in smaller metropolitan and rural areas unlikely to get access to the service will view it as another step towards widening the digital divide.

Categories
Business internet

IWF Update

You may remember the fuss surrounding the anti-child porn agency, Internet Watch Foundation back in December 2008. The IWF blocked access to a Wikipedia webpage causing much consternation.

The IWF Council is meeting tomorrow for a post mortem on the issue and is discussing setting up a technical workgroup to find a way around the problems created at the time.

The organisation is having to deal with a highly complex issue and there isn’t the space to cover it all here. What is interesting is the fact that the criminals involved are already combating the efforts of organisations such as the IWF.

Illegal images containing child pornography are often made up of thousands of separate images, a single pixel in size and each pixel containing an URL.  This way a specific URL does not contain illegal content but the combined effect does.

I’m sure I will have some feedback from the IWF meeting and will report back as and when.