Clampi: If a five year old threat is thought of as new….
By Asavin Wattanajantra in Editorial
You may have read some of the national papers today with their coverage of the ‘new’ Trojan threat ‘Clampi’.
It isn’t new, and I’ve spent quite a lot of my day trying to understand how the nationals got round to believing that it was, and how it’s become the ‘latest and greatest’ serious malware threat.
So far I’ve worked out that a Times reporter picked up on discussions of Clampi in a US paper, talked to Symantec, and decided to build a story on it.
Yep, indeed it is a threat, but its the not the only one, as I’ve tried to explain as clearly as I could in my need to know.
However from the media coverage I’ve got the impression that it is the ‘latest and greatest threat’ - it’s nothing of the sort.
The more I learn about security and the more I read how the national media reports on it - the more I realise how far we have to go before many of the journalists can even understand it.
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The summer security school in paradise
By Asavin Wattanajantra in Editorial
Posted in Greece, cybercrime, malware, crime on
I’m in Crete at the moment. An island in Greece surrounding by sea holed up in a beautiful hotel with a double bed.
You may think I’m on holiday at the moment, but no - I’m actually at the security conference held by the EU group ENISA, and I’ve already written several stories on it.
It is a weird place to get a bunch of security experts along. The conference is actually set in a resort, so while I’m here stuck inside writing security for you lucky people, tourists are passing by in around 28 degree sun flip flops and all.
Apart from the whole not actually being able to holiday thing though, I’m enjoying it. There are some very interesting people talking here, much more than the same event last year, and because there are no tech sponsors I’m not having to follow any particular security business agenda that can sometimes be a problem in IT.
There are people talking about threats as well as the public sector and business reaction to them. So far I’ve heard about the problems of e-government and web 2.0, the banking sector and cybercrime as well as the police response to it.
It is called a ’summer school’ because it’s supposed to be educational as well, as there are quite a lot of security experts, policy makers and business people as well as journalists.
ENISA seems to be making a big European-wide effort on security, and it has opened by eyes to some of the issues around the EU which we often don’t hear about in the UK as well - we don’t think it matters to us.
But as security and cybercrime has no national boundaries we should really understand what are neighbours are doing, because thanks to the international nature of e-crime, incidents in Britain can simply be triggered by the press of a button in another country.
It’s new - we need to make efforts to make sure we understand the problem.
Rated: 20% (1 votes)
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Tech companies selling the technology to track us
By Asavin Wattanajantra in Editorial
Posted in surveillance, Iran, surveillance state, hacking, malware on
In April I wrote a news story based on a talk by data encryption company PGP Inc founder Phil Zimmermann at Infosecurity, which revealed his feelings about Britain heading towards becoming a surveillance state.
But compared to countries like Iran and China, I guess we’re lucky. Both have been known to monitor citizens for years. Shockingly though, tech countries in Europe don’t look like they have any qualms in providing this surveillance technology to countries that are willing to use it in this way.
The Wall Street Journal and the BBC both reported on how the Nokia Siemens Networks (which has just bought some wireless tech from poor old Nortel) provided sophisticated technology for Iran to examine the content of online communications.
It’s not just for blocking traffic - the technology is supposed to see what information is passed back and forth. A Nokia Siemens spokesman is quoted as saying: ” Western governments, including the UK, don’t allow you to build networks without this functionality.”
It’s kind of scary. But would you expect anything less? Tech companies sell to the public as well as private sector - and very often governments around the world want to keep track of their citizens.
However, at least there are still ways to be anonymous and organise demonstrations without being tracked - as the events in Iran and the use of Twitter shows.
Even Google has to bow down to government power. Google has very quickly complied to a direct command by China to remove pornography from all its sites, even though all it is doing is linking to the content rather than having anything involved in distributing it.
But China is a big market, and there’s a lot of profit to be made. This need to make money can also be seen with the fact that the Chinese government can get away with shipping surveillance software with all of its PCs.
It’s the price we have to pay for better technology. The networking tech that makes communication on devices like mobiles so easy and useful can also be used in ways which we don’t necessarily want. Companies are there to make money - they are not our moral guardians.
As a citizen I guess the only power we have is that of the vote - and is why the Iranians are so furious that the elections over there weren’t as fair as they should be. But in the UK we still have that vote - and hopefully we can use it properly.
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The Malware Olympics - USA beat China!
By Asavin Wattanajantra in Editorial
Posted in malware, Olympics, Security on
As the medals are awarded in Beijing it looks like China are dominating all before them with a massive medal haul beating the USA into first place, with the UK doing astonishingly well this year.
However when it comes to the real competition - The Malware Olympics - it seems that the USA are beating allcomers with a massive amount of PC’s infected compared to the number two in Japan. It looks quite bad for the UK, who only get to a lowly ninth in the table.
Here’s the medal table courtesy of Trend Micro.
PC’s infected
1 USA
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