Posts for 'Cyber Crimes' Category

Cyber security in India is still at infancy stage and although the matter is of utmost importance it never find a place in the national policy of India. Further, cyber security also did not get enough support of a stringent and secure law.

Information technology act 2000 (IT Act 2000) is the sole cyber law of India and it is weak in many crucial aspects. Similarly, India does not have dedicated cyber security laws, regulations or norms.

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The Government Railway Police (GRP) want to build a cyber crime cell of their own, but are unable to commence the functioning of the cell in the GRP headquarters at Wadi Bunder because of lack of space and amenities. A network and computerisation project to connect all railway police stations under the Railway Police Commissionerate has also not started because of similar reasons.

The Central Railway is yet to accede to their request for more space. "Not a single case of cyber crime has been reported within our jurisdiction as it does not extend beyond railway tracks, stations and railway offices, and cyber crimes do not take place in these areas," said a GRP official. "Since the state government and Maharashtra police department has directed us to set up the cyber crime cell we will go ahead with the plan and be prepared to face any cyber crime in future."

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Nigeria is trying to salvage its reputation of being an axis for cyber crime and infamous scams by partnering with the U.S. government to take strides toward improving its image and bolstering its monitoring and investigations skills.

Bashir Gwandu, the acting executive vice chairman of the Nigeria Communications Commission, told NEXT how email scams claiming to be from Nigerian institutions have significantly hurt the country’s image internationally.

The partnership with the United States is an attempt to deal with the problems and combat the challenges cyber crimes present, Gwandu said. He added how the FBI and other U.S. top security agencies have leading expertise in tracing the origins of viruses, scam mails, and in identifying the physical locations of servers used to host terrorists’ websites.

“This wealth of experience, if acquired by Nigerians, will go a long way in reducing the impact of cyber crime committed in the name of Nigerians,” Gwandu said.

In a meeting last week where Nigerian and U.S. officials met to discuss the problems with cyber crime in Nigeria, Perry Ball, the counselor for economic affairs of the U.S. Embassy, offered to help the Nigerian government by providing training and capacity building so the country can better handle the challenges.

As the IT hub of the Indian state of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram has seen its share of cyber crime and is now making strides to educate the public’s awareness by launching a website that will focus primarily Internet safety, New Kerala reports.

During today’s press conference in Thiruvananthapuram, Avanzo Charitable Trust Managing Trustee Pattathil Dhany said the initiative was the result of increasing incidents of cyber crime following the spread of broadband and the subsequent use of Internet as well as the extensive use of cellphones in Kerala.

The launch will be attended by local law-enforcement officials as well as experts in the IT field. Dhany said a toll-free number will be set up for cyber-crime victims, adding, ”the helpline is intended to create fundamental awareness and learn some basic precautions while using mobiles, Internet and computers.”

”Time is a crucial factor in such cases and it’s important that people know they preserve evidence and don’t panic by taking extreme steps like suicides when they face threats,” she said. “The knowledge that there is always help available is what is intended to be spread through the helpline.”

If your computer gets infected with a virus, the Internet service providers could cut off their connection and will resume only when the problem is solved.

Well, this plan has been proposed in Australia to fight cyber crime. Such recommendations have come from an inquiry that continued for a year on cyber crime. The House of Reprentatives Standing Committee on Communications did the inquiry.

According to the Committee’s results released last night, the cyber crime has turned into an underground economy. Head of the inquiry, Ms Neal says “In the past decade, cyber crime has grown from.

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Porn surfers are likely to have out-of-date software that can be exploited, making those users an attractive target for cybecriminals, according to a study.The researchers believe their study is the first to look at the security risks of visiting online pornography Web sites rather than the economics of the online sex industry.

They studied thousands of adult Web sites and analyzed their security risks, finding that they pose more of a risk to surfers than the Web at large. "We found a relatively large number of Web sites that use questionable methods and techniques that can best be described as 'shady,'" the researchers wrote.

A major problem is that most adult Web sites are very low-margin businesses run by people unlikely to invest in technologies to properly defend their sites against hackers, said Gilbert Wondracek, a research fellow at the International Secure Systems Lab in Vienna and one of the study's authors.It's cut-throat competition," Wondracek said.

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Only two cyber-scammers were successfully prosecuted last year, despite the consumer watchdog receiving about 12,000 complaints. Tasked with investigating a range of cybercrimes, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission estimates one in 20 Australians are affected by scams each year, leading to losses of about $1 billion.

But enforcement operations general manager Scott Gregson said most cybercrime cases could not be pursued because they were outside Australia's jurisdiction. Both cases that were successfully prosecuted had some origin in Australia.

''For one of them there was clear activity within Australia,'' Gregson said. 'The other one had a combination of activity in Australia, China and elsewhere.'' But Gregson said both of the successful court actions relied on tip-offs from overseas ''one from the Fair Trade Commission in the US and the other from Washington State attorney-generals''.

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If the unlimited virus concerns are troubling you, then there's more. Now, botnets are available on rent for as cheap as $67 for 24 hours or $9 for an hour.

This empowers anyone to launch distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, sell fake antivirus software and relay spam to unsuspecting email users via millions of compromised PCs.

The cyberpunks are unanimously, hawking their wares via online forums and banner advertising. This readily reduces the barriers to entry for criminals who can't code, empowering relatively unskilled cyber criminals to inflict major damage and financial loss.

"Organizations need to be wary of the fact that their critical online applications or services could be taken down in under a day by a criminal renting services from bot herders," said Rick Howard, director of intelligence at iDefense, a VeriSign's security intelligence service. It was an iDefense report that highlighted the entire botnet selling picture.

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Technology is making it more and more easy for you and your family to be the target of online predators. "Ignorance is not bliss in this kind of situation," says parent Amy Johns. Amy is the mother of eight-year-old Caleb. She says it's never too early to teach kids internet safety, "number one, the computer should never be in a child's bedroom, no matter how responsible the child, that just opens up the door for a lot of things that may not be intentional. Secondly, a parent needs to know what their child is doing when they're on the computer, not necessarily trying to sneak or spy on a child, but having open conversations.

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The war against cyber crimes has been given a boost in Osun State . At the just concluded annual conference of Association of Vice-Chancellors of Nigeria Universities (AVCNU) the management of Osun State University (UNIOSUN) entered into a charter with the world computer giant, Microsoft.

Tagged ‘Saying No to Cybercrime’, the signing of Internet Safety Security and Privacy Charter was aimed at correcting the notorious image of Nigeria as the third in the global list of cyber crime perpetrators. Apart from UNIOSUN, the charter was also expected to be entered into by all the universities in the country, be it government-owned or privately established, as well as the National Universities Commission (NUC) and the body of Vice-Chancellors (AVCNU).

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