What is Cyber Terrorism?

The Government and the specialist of IT security have affirmed a substantial increase in the cyber crimes in the current situation. There is growing need amongst the officials concerning the intrusions which are conducted by the cyber terrorists or other terrorist organizations. This happens due to the potential loopholes in the security system as a whole.

But, what is Cyber Terrorism? Cyber terrorism is defined as the terrorist acts which are committed with using computer resources and cyberspace. A cyber terrorist is a person who frightens or compels the Government for fulfilling his or her social or political intentions. This is done by launching an attack through the computer networks. A common method of such attacks is the spreading of false propaganda on the internet about a possible terror attack at the time of holidays or some festivals. Sometimes this attack is actually carried out.

The e-commerce statistics show that if the internet is down for a single day the losses rise to billions of dollars. Not only is e-commerce affected but, the banking sector, authorizations of credit cards and other communication avenues are also affected. The list is endless. The amount of unfathomable information which is hampered is immeasurable. But, the amount of cyber terrorism correspondingly gets increased with the rise in the value of computer infrastructure. Leave aside the fiscal implications; the psychological impingement caused due to the turmoil is more damaging to the economy. The augmented reliance of the business houses, society and even the government on the internet, makes it the prime target for the terrorists for creating nuisance in the economy and the overall lives of the people.

There are some other methods too which are used by the cyber terrorists such as hacking which is channelized towards certain individuals or families. This is done by network groups which have the intention of troubling people and demonstrate their power. The primary intention of all such crimes is ruining the daily lives of the people, robberies and blackmailing etc. Cyber Terrorism is a big stigma on the society and hence, urgent measures are required for preventing it.

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Why You Won't Find a High Anonymity Proxy on the Free Proxy Lists

If you are looking for a high anonymity proxy to allow you to surf in private and protect your identity online then it can be tempting to just latch on to one of the many free proxy lists and simply use one of them. In practice this is often a very frustrating experience as these free proxies are often completely overloaded and extremely slow. Now I don't know about you but I have no real yearning for the days of surfing the web down a 28.8k modem but the reality can be very similar using one of these free proxies.

The reason is not very difficult to see, bandwidth is expensive and running a fast secure proxy server is an extremely costly business. To offer this service for free obviously will quickly use up lots of badnwidth and server resources.

Have you ever wondered why these people supply free proxy servers ?

I mean it's very generous of them to supply a valuable resource like this but you must wonder why they are incurring this expense for no gain. Well the answer is surprisingly simple - the vast majority of these so called anonymous proxies are either hacked or misconfigured servers and the real owners have no idea that they are being used like this. In fact often the first time the administrators realise their mistake is when they see their network statistics or bandwidth charges - ouch !

Now of course it is possible that you are willing to overlook this fact and still happily use the free proxy servers but don't expect speed and certainly don't expect any level of anonymity. These servers are usually inheritently insecure and in fact often the proxy service is actually installed by hackers or identity thieves in order to intercept passwords and logins. Just remember all your data is going through one place with a proxy server, the administrator has potentially complete access to everything that goes down that connection.

In fact the problem is far from being a high anonymity proxy server these free proxies are just about the most insecure way of surfing the web. Sure, you'll protect your identity from the web server you visit but not from anyone else and maybe you are really unlucky and pick one of the free hacked proxies run by Eastern European Hacking groups !

To see which software I use to protect my web browsing - you can read about Identity Cloaker here.

If you want to read about some of my thoughts on using anonymous proxies and general privacy issues on free speech please visit my new blog here Anonymous Surfing Proxies

Surf safely, protect your privacy,

Jim

Are Anonymous Proxy Lists the Key to Anonymous Web Browsing?

Well they sure sound like it don't they - pick a server from the anonymous proxy list and direct all your surfing through it. It does give the impression of security but I'm afraid it doesn't quite tell the whole picture and in fact if you're unlucky using this method may effectively give away your identity online.

The key to understanding the role of the anonymous proxy is really understanding what a proxy actually does. You've almost certainly used one at work or school if you have access to the internet. Very basically all your web requests are sent to this server and then directed out at the target site, the proxy server then forwards all the received information to your browser. The advantage is that your work or school can control what goes in and out of their network and has a list of every web page surfed.

When you use one of the free anonymous proxies from these lists that is what you are doing, sending all your information via this one server to forward all requests. The advantage and the reason people use them is that your own IP address is not logged on the server you visit (it logs the proxies address instead)

The disadvantage is that you basically hand all your web traffic to the owner of one server to control, the system administrator of the proxy server can access ALL your web traffic if they wish, as well as log all your activity as well. One of the other disadvantages is that you will almost certainly slow down your browsing substantially, these proxies almost inevitably get overused and it adds another hop to your browsing.

The other significant problem is that these anonymous proxy servers are usually hacked or misconfigured servers, they are often full of spyware and the real owners often have no idea t hey are being used as a proxy! If you use an anonymous proxy make sure you know who runs and administrates this server and that you are not using one owned by a European Hacking Crew!

To be anonymous on the internet you need to do much more than use an anonymous proxy server in any case. All your web traffic and your IP address are accessible across the wire and everything is logged at your ISP (for two years in Europe). HTML traffic is mostly sent in clear text, it's perfectly readable as you'll see if you ever start a sniffer at a wireless cafe or hotel.

I use a solution which combines a network of secure and private proxies (so I can change my location when I need) that is I can appear as a US surfer one minute, then use a German proxy a few minutes later. It also encrypts my connection completely using a military grade cipher called AES so nobody not even my ISP can view my connection. Obviously I have to pay a small charge for this but I would rather stay secure and anonymous and my browsing speed is not affected.

If you want to read about some of my thoughts on using anonymous proxies and how you can surf without being spied on, try the link below.

Anonymous Surfing Proxies

Jim

Email Spam Scams and Variations of 419 Scams

With the horrific stories of successful scammers making millions from fraudulent activities online, efforts are now in full force to crack down the 419 scammers. An ABC documentary on the subject traced a scam to its origins in Nigeria.

The ABC documentary was just one of many efforts, now getting more concerted, to crack down on the fraudsters perpetuating this activity on a massive scale. The Nigerian police has created the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), a special division specifically to enforce the section of the Nigerian Criminal Code, 419. The code makes it illegal to obtain money by false pretenses. It was not enforced until recently.

The scams happen worldwide. The old, traditional post mail scams have now escalated to million-dollar, worldwide fraud business because of the availability and accessibility of internet facilities. What authorities find out though, is that a lot of these scammers are not part of an organization. While there may be highly organized master scammers, many are small scale schemes looking to make an easy buck.

A lot of the scams have been traced back to parts of Western Africa. Nigeria is a hot spot. The decline in Nigeria's oil-drive economy has left millions desperately poor. But instead of looking for decent jobs, thousands of computer-savvy Nigerians are making a living off of thousands of gullible people from the West, many of whom are Americans.

Spam emails are the most widely used method of fraud. Spammers send varied types of fraudulent emails. It begins with the use of email extraction programs that scour internet websites for email addresses. In some instances, fraudsters obtain a list of email addresses from the black market.

The scammer would usually pose as a widow or heir of a corrupt government official who has left his family with embezzled money stashed away in some hidden account. The widow would ask help to get their money on the funds and in exchange, promise millions of dollars in reward money.

Sometimes, a scammer will pose as a diplomat or a corrupt government official looking to make for a partner-investor in a business. The proposal is usually to ask help to funnel dirty money and "cleanse" it. The money is supposedly stashed somewhere inaccessible. If one helps release the funds that would require advancing a small sum of money, the victim will supposedly receive a million-dollar reward and business deal.

Scammers will sometimes notify a victim of winning a lottery online. The amounts would be anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars purportedly held in trust somewhere pending your accomplishment of some paper work. Typically, the victim will be asked to pay a small sum to cover facilitation and processing fees before the money could be released.

Some scammers will identify themselves as a bank officer knowing of a deceased depositor who has died without a next of kin. He would ask the victim to help them get the funds before others do by posing as next of kin and filing a claim. The victim will then be promised a commission, a reward for the help.

More recent forms now involve romance angles and a lot of them now operate in dating sites and online communities. They pose as desperate women wanting to fall in love and scam lonely, gullible men for cash.

For more information on Anti-Spam Forum and Charitable Fraud and Religious Scams please visit our website.

Screwing With the System - The Most Dangerous Computer Viruses Ever

The worldwide web is actually very much like our world in several aspects, it's just a little weirder at times. Like the everyday waking world, there are a of ways to have fun, to socialize, to engage in artistic endeavors or to establish a good business strategy among other things. And as much as there are a lot of good things about the web, there are also a lot of dangers to look out for. Hackers (or crackers for that matter) are like thieves and trespassers that use dexterity and careful planning to steal information or money. Cyber-stalkers are much like real life stalkers except that they have the advantage of anonymity and fading into the shadows much thanks to all the advantages the Internet offers. And then much like in the real world, we or our computers can and do get sick-from threats like computer viruses.

What makes these viruses unique from the vicious strains found in nature is that they are man-made. And instead of killing and crippling individual people, they have the capacity to cripple and kill entire industries, organizations and services. Many call the creators of these deadly strains criminals although some have created cult fanbases for themselves, which believe them to be modern day heroes. Whatever you may think of them, here is a list of the most deadly viruses that have been released to damage sectors of society, as a form of protest, or even as some say, by accident:

Melissa Virus: The Melissa virus was one of the most dangerous viruses and one of the fastest spreading ones in recent memory. It infected about 20% of computers worldwide, including the networks of Microsoft, Intel and other companies that relied on MS Outlook to be their default email client. Countless email servers around the world were forced to shut down just to halt the spread of this virus. The email came with an MS Word attachment that, when opened emailed itself to the first 50 people in your contact list. It also overwrote the document files in the infected computer with quotes from the famous TV show, 'The Simpsons'.

Blaster: This was a virulent strain of malware that spread itself not through email but through the vulnerability of both the Windows 2000 and Windows XP machines. Once a computer was infected, it displayed a message box indicating that the system would shut down in a couple of minutes. Discovered in the code was a message to Microsoft owner, Bill Gates saying: "Billy Gates, why do you make this possible? Stop making money, and fix your software!"

MyDoom: When the list of very damaging mass-mailing viruses is compiled, MyDoom will definitely be on the list. Though primarily written to spread through email, its growth became almost impossible to check with the emergence of the P2P software KaZaA. The MyDoom virus slowed down Internet access by 10% and caused some website access to be reduced by 50%. It was said that during its heyday, one it ten email messages sent contained the virus.

These are just a few of the many notorious viruses that have had computer owners and companies shaking their heads and pulling their hairs out in frustration. If you want more of the best instances of cyber-terrorism just visit: http://crunkish.com/top-ten-worst-computer-viruses/ .

Why I Use an Anonymous Web Proxy Service

I've been using an anonymous web proxy service for some time now and I don't think I would ever go back to ordinary surfing. It's not that I am some sort of shadowy cyber criminal with some secret online life, no I pretty much surf the same web sites as everyone else, I certainly don't go to illegal or criminal sites.

If you want to know why, it's simply because I value my privacy and I know what data is stored in the average organisation and how it is protected. Take your ISP for example, they logs pretty much everything that passes through them - every single request, every web page, every email and even every image is logged. The vast majority of this traffic is in cleartext so the majority of it is instantly readable and can be matched to your address.

It's amazing what these logs can tell about people you can build up a lot of information about someone from what they do on the web. So do you know who has access to these logs at your ISP, what controls are in place, how is this information stored ?

If you don't know your not alone but after 25 years working in IT, I'll pretty much bet you wouldn't like to know the answer anyway. This is the problem with much internet communication, it's so completely open - occasionally you'll obviously use a secure site to type in your credit card details. Yet up to the point all your information is flying across the internet ether completely unprotected and accessible to anyone who has the will and the knowledge to intercept it.

Believe me there are plenty of people who do have an interest in your information

Why do you think a European Directive was recently passed - Directive on Mandatory Retention of Communications Traffic Data. It's a bit of a mouthful but what it's actually doing is forcing your ISP to keep a record of every email sent, every internet session and web site visited for two years. So think back at every web site you've ever visited for the last two years and it's on record and can be matched to your own little electronic profile.

How does that make you feel?

Even if you've done nothing wrong it's bound to make you feel a little uneasy after all why do Governments want all this information about us? If you want to feel a little more uneasy, many Governments are looking at the UK Governments idea who are going to store all this information in a central database accessible to certain organisations. Fear not US citizens you'll not be left out - the FBI are pushing hard for similar data retention facilities.

Storing data is dangerous

If you store data you have to be prepared to take good care of it. All the privacy erosion concerns aside, the more personal data is stored about us, the more people will have access to it. How thorough do you think is the vetting procedure for an ISP Technical engineer ? Who potentially has access to huge amounts of this data. Even if implicitly trust our govenrments with this tremendous invasion of our privacy - fraudsters, identity thieves and others can create mayhem with this sort of information. These logs are gold dust to anyone trying to steal our identity for example - they can match up users, with web sites, pick up password and all sorts of personal information. Even though a small part of this information is encrypted when you're actually using a secure web site (with the padlock below) there's plenty of other personal information available to compromise your usernames, password etc.

An identity thief can pick up huge amounts of data about the average person all ready, an hour or two picking up all your web traffic and they'll also have where you bank, what web sites you visit and logon to and a whole heap more. This unfortunately is the tip of the iceberg and I suspect you'll see many, many people protecting their privacy online soon from identity thieves, hackers and even our friendly snooping governments.

Everything I do online is private, I use a fast professional service that anonymises my connection and encrypts all the data. My web logs sit next to yours in a server room at my ISP however mine are all completely encrypted and unreadable by anyone, whereas yours are in clear text.

One thing I should warn people about is the use of free anonymous web proxy services which you see all over the web. Be very, very careful about these and think why are they supplying a very expensive and resource hungry service for free? Remember also that by using one of these free proxies you are redirecting your traffic via this server whose owner can capture and log your data himself. Many of these are owned and run by Eastern European Hacking groups as an easy way to gain peoples traffic, so be careful.

So if you don't want hackers, crackers, identity thieves or even governments snooping on what you do on the internet do as I do. I use the most secure and professional service to encrypt and protect my web activities - the excellent Identity Cloaker service - click here to read more about them - Protect your Privacy

How to Successfully Monitor the Access of Your Child to the Internet

While installing surveillance cameras in a room would be a really far-fetched idea, it would seem advisable that you can somehow monitor what your children do on the internet. Therefore, you need to find the valid tools and processes that will ensure your child is protected against any internet attack.

While the best idea to monitor your children would be to sit next to them and watch them, sometimes constant surveillance is not possible. Therefore, you need to keep the internet connection somewhere at reach so that you can access it whenever you want to. Also, the computer needs to be located in a room different from that of the children, because otherwise they might be tempted to enter in the computer too often.

For smaller children, aged from two to ten years old, it is always advisable to be there with them when they are accessing the internet. Since this vast domain encompasses a lot of risks and there is a lot of gibber lurking around it, it is important that you know how to select only what is the most important fort your child and then make the browsing through the internet a valuable activity.

Another possibility would be to make sure that if you have a teenager or pre-teenager, then it would be best to instill some other rules. You need to keep constant checks on the web history that your computer can store and also know how to master the Hosts file from the computer so that you can keep blocking out content. Therefore, using browsers as well as filtering software such as the ChildLock, Bsafe Online, Mcaffee Internet Security, Cyber Snoop or Net mop, you will ensure that you are protected against online attacks.

As parent, you are also expected to instill in your child the feeling of responsibility and value of privacy. You need to openly discuss with your child topics such as health or sexuality without delving into the other extreme. Router with internet filtering abilities can also be a solution to your security problems. Therefore, you need to know the way of being able to block out content.

While hardware and software are good tools in helping parent's monitoring kids online activities, they are no substitute to teaching your children internet safety tips