Archive
Category: Crime and Security
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Facebook and the 2011 London riots
Be careful what you write. In R v Blackwell [2011] EWCA Crim 2312, Lord Judge CJ offers this blunt description of the role played by “modern technology” (principally Facebook, Blackberry’s BBM protocol, Twitter and SMS messaging) in the recent London riots. Rejecting the appellants’ argument that incitement via Facebook was a less serious offence because… Read more →
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The Great Cyberheist: Inside the life of an identity thief
The New York Times has a fantastic writeup of the criminal activities and investigation of Alberto Gonzalez, a black-hat hacker who masterminded the TJX and Heartland Payment Systems credit card data breaches and who was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment earlier this year. The story has a cinematic, but slightly tragic quality: At the same… Read more →
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Botnet hosts strongly clustered around safe haven providers
Interesting survey of the connection between website hosts and botnet ‘command and control’ servers, which are used to direct networks of malware-infected clients: For the first half of 2010, almost a quarter of botnet CnC servers were hosted by service providers in the US, with the top three countries (US – 23.9 per cent, Germany… Read more →
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Fraudulent transfers of title and Nigerian scammers
It looks like the Nigerian 419 scammers are getting more sophisticated. A South African investor found his Australian property sold to third party purchasers without his knowledge after having his email account hacked: Fraudsters swiped Mildenhall’s email login credentials and obtained personal property documents before selling a house and sending funds to Chinese bank accounts.… Read more →
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Bulletproof hosting, cybercrime and botnets
The Register has an interesting piece analysing how cybercrime botnets are connected and why they seem impervious to outside attack. It seems that the botnets are programmed to reconfigure themselves if one upstream provider goes down, and are each strongly interconnected, which creates a whole lot of redundancy: “What they’ve worked really hard to do… Read more →
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Iran launches cyberattack on human rights websites
According to Iranian news reports, Iranian intelligence forces have hacked into 29 human rights activism websites which they allege are a front for US espionage and intelligence agencies. The attack follows the finding of an Iranian domestic court that the websites were developed to spy on Iran’s nuclear programme, and for the purpose of ‘provoking… Read more →
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More hyperbolic warnings of Chinese ‘cyber spies’
A report produced by the US–China Economic and Security Review Commission suggests that malicious attacks on United States military computer systems increased by 20 per cent in 2008, a figure that is projected to grow by 60 per cent in 2009. Experts attributed much of the increase to attacks originating in China: “A large body… Read more →
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Individual to be prosecuted for domain name ‘theft’
A number of news agencies are reporting that Daniel Goncalves, a 25 year-old law firm technician, is being prosecuted for the ‘theft’ of domain name P2P.com: Attorney Paul Keating told DNN that most cases of domain theft recovery that he has dealt with have been complicated at best. The real problem stems from the fact… Read more →
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Melbourne game pirate convicted of commercial copyright infringement
According to The Age, a fellow University of Melbourne alumnus has been convicted of three counts of commercial copyright infringement and fined $20 000 for running a duplication lab in (wait for it) his mother’s basement: Jeffrey Lim, 28, converted the ground floor of his parents’ Doncaster home into a work office that held six hard… Read more →
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Largest ever securities fraud rocks Indian outsourcing goliath
This week’s high-tech crime is a new twist on an old favourite: securities fraud. It recently emerged that one of India’s largest outsourcing firms, Satyam Computer, had ‘overestimated’ its cash reserves and asset values by around 50 billion rupees (AUD $1.38bn). According to the company founder and chairman, this was ‘purely on account of inflated… Read more →