I’m no football fan, I’ve made that clear enough this last few weeks. However, while I don’t like to see the national team humiliated in the way they were by Germany over the weekend, I can’t help but feel that the 4-1 drubbing might just be a blessing in disguise as far as Internet security is concerned.

It’s OK, I’ve not gone totally mad and entered into some strange realm of hugely tenuous links, I’m actually quite serious about this. The football World Cup is one of those relatively rare events that tick pretty much every box that your average spammer, scammer and Internet bad guy can look for in a current event to latch onto. It is not only big news, but it’s big news all over the globe. What’s more, it’s the kind of big news that stirs up national pride and gets huge swathes of the online population talking about it, arguing about it most importantly reading about it. The World Cup is, in other words, a malicious link poster wet dream.

As I mentioned recently, 25 percent of all global spam is currently related to the World Cup and much of that will contain malicious linkage. Although I have no actual figures to shore up my next argument, I’m going to stick with it based purely on the sheer number of emails that have been passed my way and the off the record conversations I’ve had with security researchers: Many of those malicious links and the messages that spread them relate to the damn vuvuzela.

There, I’ve said it. The hugely annoying plastic trumpet that nobody can play, unless it is meant to sound like a Wookie with toothache that is, has been the second most dominant news force of this World Cup after the fact that England cannot play of course. Which means that the malware authors love it, as the latest attack using Twitter to spread a message which simply reads “OMG! Vuvuzela banned!” along with some hashtags to help spread the word (#worldcup and #vuvuzelabanned) and, of course, assorted malicious links. According to Andrew Brandt at Webroot the tweets use different link shortening services to mask the destination of these links, a bogus image hosting site Image Sheep, and while you are there, in the background, your PC is herded into a botnet.
Brandt warns “there is a real image hosting service by the same name, but the real Image Sheep is registered elsewhere and hosted in an entirely different network than these fake Image Sheep clones”.

The multiple payloads at the fake site appear to include the receipt of stolen user data batches which are used to login to Twitter and Facebook amongst others, another “contains scripting that adds an entry with details about the victim’s computer into a MySQL database” and this reports on “the number of infected users, the rate at which people infect themselves, and the clicks to various parts of the page”.

As I say, the good news for those of us in the UK at any rate is that I suspect these kind of exploits will be a lot less effective now that England has been knocked out of the World Cup and general interest in the competition wanes. Strangely enough then, I think we should all be thanking the Germans for doing us a favour…

Newly published research from Ofcom reveals many things: 80 percent of adults in the UK will only share social networking data with friends and family, only 30 percent think that Internet information is reliable compared to 50 percent for TV and radio, and the Scottish are pretty crap when it comes to online security stuff.

The Adult Media Literacy report is encouraging in many respects, not least as it does show a trend towards security awareness amongst most UK Internet users. That 80 percent of adults being happy to share their social networking account data with friends and family only figure, for example, is way up from the 48 percent who said the same in 2007.

It’s not all good news though, with a quarter of Internet users admitting that they lacked confidence when it came to installing filtering software and configuring security features. This despite the security vendors going flat out to develop more user friendly fire-and-forget products. Obviously a lot more work needs to be done to make security solutions truly user friendly, and I suspect that much of that work needs to be at the educational rather than interface level. The trade off between usability and security is such that users have to make the defence granularity choice themselves, leaving it to software inevitably leads to a broken online experience in some way, shape or form. If the user doesn’t properly understand the implications of the choices they make then they will never get that balance right. Simply telling someone to default to ‘allow nothing’ is about as useful as scaffolding made from jelly.

However, I digress, back to the ‘it is not all good news’ thing: while the UK national trend for understanding online security issues is up nicely, one part of the country does seem to be lagging behind somewhat. Yes, I’m talking about you Scotland.

The report reveals that adults in Scotland are the least likely overall to worry about entering their personal data online, and some fifty percent of Scots are happy to enter their home address details on the Internet compared to just 23 percent in Wales and Northern Ireland for example. Yet this despite Scottish adults being the biggest home users of the Internet in the UK on 10.6 hours per week each on average, compared to 8.3 hours in England and 6.8 hours in Wales. Scottish users also account for the biggest percentage of social networking users on 49 percent with such profiles compared to 46 percent in Wales, 44 percent in England and just 31 percent in Northern Ireland.

So there you have it, proof that the Scottish are crap when it comes to online security - at least in comparison to the rest of the UK.

I guess I had better batten down the hatches now then and await a virtual Glasgow kiss or three…

Ever since Gizmodo broke the news about that iPhone 4G that was left in a bar, it seems everyone wants to know more about the next generation Jesus Phone from Apple. But at what price?

How does free grab you? Well that’s the promise that’s been spotted by security experts Sophos appearing in both Twitter and email-based spam scams. An email is doing the rounds which offers the (un)lucky recipients the opportunity to test and ultimately keep an iPhone 4G. This despite the fact that it has yet to be released, and Apple has yet to officially say anything about it other than ‘give us our prototype back’ either. The scam, of course, being that anyone wanting to sign up for the free testing deal has to hand over personal information in order to do so and the spam is really just a clever phishing exercise.

The Twitter scam is equally sinister, using the accounts of apparently sexy young women to offer free iPhone 4G handsets for users who click on a promotional link. A link that, of course, takes them to a personal data harvesting website.

As Graham Cluley of Sophos says “some internet users might blindly hand over their personal information in the belief that they will get a preview version of what will be one of 2010’s hottest gadgets”. I’d take issue with that statement, in that there is no ‘might’ about it and some users will, for sure, do just that. Be it as a result of living in a freebie society where people happily expect to get something for nothing, or maybe it’s the effect of junk food on the brain, but there are certainly plenty of people who will fall for this scam.

While I don’t imagine for a minute that the average IT Pro reader falls into this bracket, it might be worth letting your friends and family know that the price of an iPhone 4G right now is just too high to be worth risking that mouse click upon.

With a general election just weeks away now, I’ve been wondering just what part Twitter will play in electing the next government? A new poll by Lewis Communications has revealed that 24 percent of the 1000 people consulted thought that Twitter was an essential communication tool in a democracy such as ours. That said, only 27 percent said they might be encouraged to vote for an MP who contacted them through their social networking service compared to 48 percent who would not be so minded. Mind you, one in six of those asked also thought that the barman in The Simpsons, Moe Szyslak, was a political blogger so maybe we shouldn’t take these figures too seriously.

A couple of numbers that did jump out at me from that survey though were related to online voting and political websites: 77 percent wanted to vote online this year, and 56 percent had visited a political website already in the run up to the General Election. Eb Adeyeri, Digital PR Director at LEWIS Communications, reckons that many people believe this will be “the UK’s first “Internet election” with politicians exploiting channels such as Facebook and Twitter to convey their message” but warns that a “badly-focused social media campaign could do more harm than good as Gordon Brown discovered with his infamous YouTube appearance”.

The Labour Party is taking Twitter seriously enough to have appointed a ‘Twitter Tsar’ in Kerry McCarthy MP, while Tory leader David Cameron famously dismissed Twitter users on a radio show by saying that “too many twits make a twat”.

Certainly there are more MPs, and would be MPs, using Facebook and Twitter than ever before it seems to me. Of course, the cynical side of me does accept that the rise of the micro-blogging and socially networked MP and the forthcoming election may be linked. There’s even less doubting that Twitter has become politicised to a degree, and loosely organised Tweet campaigns can be more effective as a lobbying tool than many other avenues when it comes to getting massive media attention in the shortest timescale. We’ve already seen many such groundswell campaigns on Twitter, and as the election draws ever closer I expect we will see many more. Of course, with that election looming we’ll have to expect less of these campaigns to be true feelings of the people events and more of them to have the hand of The Party pushing them.

But how can you track and analyse party political activity on Twitter? Sense Internet reckons it has the answer with the newly released the Tweetlection tool which
claims to track comments about political parties on Twitter, providing a picture of those politically motivated keywords that are most active at any given time.

“While all parties engage in tweeting, until now it has been hard to get a real-time picture of what is being said on key issues, and by whom,” says Sense MD Aidan Cook. “Previously it was difficult to get an accurate view of just how much excitement or interest a specific event or issue was generating”. Cook reckons that users will be able to get at a glance overviews of “the frequency of tweets over time for each party and the common themes in those tweets” which could help political parties modify existing themes and messages, or even create new ones.

You don’t have to be a Twitter Psychic to know when people are away from home, you can use the Please Rob Me website instead.

A group by the name of Forthehack has launched a website called Please Rob Me which serves to expose the security risk of location-aware online services such as Twitter and Foursquare. It has opted to do so by listing all the empty homes that are available to be robbed by publishing a live feed of those Foursquare players who automatically post location updates to Twitter.

As I write this there are some 180 ‘new opportunities’ to rob someone, with Twitter usernames displaying exactly when these people left home.

So why am I publicising this? Because it’s a really good idea in that it exposes the folly of sharing your location data, at all times, via services such as Twitter, Google Buzz and of course Foursquare to the world at large without a second thought to the security implications of doing so.

Some might argue that it is irresponsible to publish this data, but hang on a minute the whole point is that all this data is already in the public domain. The irresponsible action is being taken by those choosing to put it their, not by those opting to remind them how stupid they are being.

Seriously, would you put an advert in the local paper saying ‘I’m leaving my house tomorrow at 10am and won’t be back for 3 hours’ or such like? I’m guessing the answer is no, yet plenty of people are quite happy to do the equivalent online in the name of being social, or playing a game. It really does beggar belief.

Seriously again, things are even more problematical with geo-location aware services these days as they can actually post maps showing exactly where you are based on the GPS data of the mobile device being used to make your postings. So not only do people let the world know they are leaving the house empty, but they show them exactly how far away from it they are as well.

Here’s what the people behind the Please Rob me site have to say in defence of their actions:

“Don’t get us wrong, we love the whole location-aware thing. The information is very interesting and can be used to create some pretty awesome applications. However, the way in which people are stimulated to participate in sharing this information, is less awesome. Services like Foursquare allow you to fulfill some primeval urge to colonize the planet. A part of that is letting everyone know you own that specific spot. You get to tell where you are and if you’re there first, it’s yours. O, and of course there’s badges. The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you’re definitely not… home. So here we are; on one end we’re leaving lights on when we’re going on a holiday, and on the other we’re telling everybody on the internet we’re not home. It gets even worse if you have “friends” who want to colonize your house. That means they have to enter your address, to tell everyone where they are. Your address.. on the internet.. Now you know what to do when people reach for their phone as soon as they enter your home. That’s right, slap them across the face. The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc. Because all this site is, is a dressed up Twitter search page. Everybody can get this information.”

I’ve been all over the Johnny Depp is NOT dead story this weekend like a nasty rash. Seriously, how this could have spread quite so quickly is beyond me. It has run broad as well as deep, which is unusual for a Twitter hoax. However, it does serve to demonstrate not only how important Twitter is becoming as a breaking news source but also how badly things can go wrong if you treat Twitter Trending Topics as gospel instead of Chinese Whispers.

It only took me a few minutes of Googling to dig up the fact that the supposed car crash was actually an old hoax resurrected from 2004, and it wasn’t a very good one back then to be honest. The lazy hoaxer just pasted an image over an existing CNN news story page but couldn’t be arsed to remove the original text. So one minute it was talking about Depp in an alcohol fuelled death crash and the next about some British Navy types having a lucky escape from a caving accident. Sigh.

Sure, I had the advantage of being an online news guy so am blessed with one of those ‘I’ve heard that somewhere before’ kind of memories which comes with the territory. So when my wife woke me up and was all “the man I love is dead” on my ass I knew it was a hoax. Obviously I also knew my marriage was not, perhaps, as secure as I had thought but that’s another story.

What else I knew, once I’d done my investigating and written it up in the forlorn hope it might help stem the tide of misinformed tweets (it didn’t) was that it wouldn’t be long before the RIP Johnny Depp malware hit the web. Another forlorn hope that a security journalist warning the public to be alert might stop link clicking idiots doing just that. Still, the news stories went out yesterday.

Today the inevitable has happened and Graham Cluley over at Sophos has the video evidence of malware scammers using the web to direct people expecting to find video footage and news of the Johnny Depp death crash to something even nastier. Part of me wants to say that look, if you are searching for video footage of a celebrity perishing in a car crash then you deserve everything the malware scumbags throw at you. But then again, I’ve seen how devoted Depp fans react to the news that their idol may be dead (waves at wife across the office) and know that logic can often be thrown out of the window in an attempt to get at the truth.

To save you the trouble, here is the truth:

Depp did not die in a car crash in 2004 or 2010 and there is no video footage as a result.

Twitter should not be treated like News at Ten, but more as a load of people down the pub - and you wouldn’t necessarily believe Bob at eleven when he tells you that Gordon Brown has resigned over a sex scandal and he knows it is true because Fred told him and he heard it from the barman. Would you?

If ever the increasing power of social networks were doubted, here’s the proof that the Internet has found a voice and is making it heard. Rage Against the Machine has beaten all the odds to take the Christmas Number One in the music charts with Killing in the name, despite it being an almost foregone conclusion this time last week that it would be the X-Factor winner getting the glory yet again.

The race to the top of the music charts used to be fun and interesting, and I recall having a flutter at the bookies for my favoured record many a year. Sure, the music might not have been great but Christmas was the one time of the year when the novelty record stood a chance.

The the X-Factor came along and pretty much ruined Xmas for me by taking the chance out of the equation, and making it a dead cert that whichever act one would take their boring and bland poppy cover version of some song or other to the top spot courtesy of millions of TV fans eager to buy into whatever Simon Cowell was selling them.

Pop mogul Simon Cowell undoubtedly understands the music business and knows what sells and how to sell it. However, he seriously misunderstood just how powerful a force social networking can be and how it to knows how to influence real world music sales.

Thanks to Jon Morter, who started the campaign to topple the X Factor on Facebook, the 1992 expletive-laden rock/rap classic from Rage Against the Machine sold more than half a million copies and beat the X-Factor winner into the number 2 spot with a clear 50,000 lead in sales.

So there you have it, we saw it before when a Daily Mail columnist annoyed the Twitterati and we’ve seen it again with Facebook and Twitter users deciding to make a point. With an election coming up, you have to wonder just how seriously politicians will be taking the threat of a social networking influenced electorate finding their online voice.

Ross Noble is, as anyone who has seen his stand up performances, a somewhat surreal comedian. While I am not convinced there is such a thing as a typical Twitter user, it’s unlikely that Noble would fit such a category. So it came as no real surprise when he invited his followers on Twitter, all 30,275 of them, to effectively Twitter Bomb Bristol East MP Kerry McCarthy with silly questions.

McCarthy, known by some as the Twitter Tsar courtesy of heading up new media campaigning for the Labour Party, was duly bombarded with totally daft questions. Things got even more surreal when, in a totally unexpected turn of events, rather than ignore the questions or complain about being Twitter bombed, McCarthy started answering as many as she could.

Indeed, across a six hour period she managed to answer more than 100 of them and that was inbetween meetings and casting votes in parliament.

My favourite would probably have to be the response to someone challenging her to start a Mexican wave in the House of Commons: “We do it on the Labour benches when Nick Clegg is speaking”. Although, to be fair, the reply of “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” to Ross Noble’s own query as to if Billy Ocean would make a difference to Labours chances on election day was pretty sharp as well. The most surreal answer has to be “I frequently dress up as the Holiday Armadillo” but I’m not going to tell you what the question was, you can go find that yourself by looking at McCarthy’s Twitter stream.

While this was all done in the best possible taste, and Noble himself set ‘rules’ asking people to be polite but daft in their questioning, it does make one wonder how long it will be before Twitter gets used to let off some seriously disruptive bombs. After all, there is an election coming up and politicians are embracing Twitter as a means of engaging the voters. All it takes is for a coordinated campaign of Tweet Bombing by accounts with enough members between them to make it count and we could witness the first TDoS - Twitter Denial of Service attack.

When that does happen, and I suspect it will be when rather than if considering we’ve already seen the political power of the beast, I will be hugely interested to see how Twitter management react. It could prove to be a tough test for the Twitter powers that be, especially if it wants the business world to start taking notice.

Having been a member of Twitter (@happygeek) since Feb 2007 I’m not convinced there is a such a thing as a typical Twitter user. InSites Consulting begs to differ, however.

According to the Ultimate Twitter Study, which analysed some 50,000 Tweets around the globe using qualitative, quantitative and observational research methods the typical Twitter user is a man in his late twenties or early thirties who is tech savvy and works in IT, media/advertising or consulting.

The interesting thing with this profile being that it bears more than a passing resemblance to the profile of a typical early adopter of the Internet itself, says a twenty something tech savvy media type at the time. That’s where the resemblance ends though, as the Ultimate Twitter Study reckons that your average Twitterer is pretty influential offline courtesy of being an industry expert, journalist or blogger for example.

Looking beyond the personal profile the study reveals, if that’s the right word, how people tend to use Twitter as “a social network of friends and/or business contacts enabling them to share and discover interesting, exciting, inspiring or funny news or hyperlinks in a very fast way” - can I say well duh at this point?

Tom De Ruyck, a Senior Research Consultant at InSites Consulting, reckons that “Twitter is a conversation hive” and one with a real value for “brands to tap into it and learn from what consumers are saying about them”. I feel another ‘duh’ coming on.

“People often send tweets in the heat of the moment: when they experience something positive or negative with a product. This immediacy is never seen before” De Ruyck continues, obviously having never heard of Usenet, Internet Forums or Blogs.

He could be on to something, though, when he argues that personal blogs in general are being diluted in value courtesy of the amount of time it takes to maintain them. While De Ruyck admits that big blogs run by teams of professional journalists will continue, he says that the individual blogs are “disappearing one by one” and the Twitter-style “micro-blogging is the new, more efficient version of the amateur blog”.

This week, the true power of Twitter was revealed and oh boy was it a sight to behold. Who said Twitter was just a bunch of willy waving celebs polishing egos and plugging books, followed by a bunch of sad geeks with nothing better to do?

First there was the not so small matter of Carter Ruck, Trafigura, Parliamentary proceedings and The Guardian. When The Guardian was prevented on reporting a question to be asked in Parliament by a so-called super-injunction taken out by solicitors Carter Ruck acting on behalf of oil trader Trafigura, Twitter went ballistic.

The super-injunction not only prevented The Guardian from reporting on the question about Trafigura being asked in Parliament, but also prevented them from reporting that the injunction had been taken out in the first place.

That didn’t prevent The Guardian from publishing that “the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck” or that published House of Commons order papers contained “a question to be answered by a minister later this week” which might somehow be involved. “The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found” it admitted.

But that was enough for quick witted Twitter users to join the dots and work out exactly what was going on. Within a few hours not only had the hashtag #trafigura topped the Twitter trending list, but by the next morning Trafigura, Carter-Ruck and CarterRuck occupied three out of the four top trending keywords on Twitter for good measure.

By the time that Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger had confirmed that he was due at the High Court in London to argue that the injunction be lifted, not least because it was a clear infraction of the 1688 Bill of Rights which protects Parliamentary privilege and the rights of the press to report upon Parliamentary proceedings, the damage had already been done. It came as no real surprise when Carter Ruck lifted the injunction against the newspaper with Twitter users absolutely playing a part in ensuring that happened.

And so it was revealed that the fuss was all about a question from Labour MP Paul Farrelly asking about the reporting of a toxic waste dumping incident in the Ivory Coast, and which wanted to know if ministers had taken any measures to protect whistle blowers and the press following the obtaining of an injunction against publication of a report which looked at the incident.

The Minton Report, which at the time remained subject of an injunction, has since also been released from that legal stranglehold and you can read what all the fuss was about here.

Then, later the same week, came the Daily Mail and a columnist called Jan Moir. Ordinarily, nobody really pays much attention to the Daily Mail publishing a homophobic rant, but this particular one came at exactly the wrong time. Not only was the UK genuinely grieving the loss of a popular boy band singer, Stephen Gately, but Twitter was still psyched by the success earlier in the week.

So when this particular columnist appeared to be insinuating that Stephen Gately had died because he was gay, even though the coroner reported that he died of natural causes, Twitter exploded once more. The column in question included such lines as “Healthy and fit 33-year-old men do not just climb into their pyjamas and go to sleep on the sofa, never to wake up again” and went on to state that the death was not a natural one. Of course, a little research quickly reveals that healthy 30 year olds do die in their sleep with alarming regularity.

But it was the attempt to somehow connect the fact that Gately had been out clubbing with his partner, and that they had returned home with another man, to the death that just proved too much. It could not have been more offensive, nor more insensitive, had the newspaper used a headline of ‘Gayness kills popstar’ to be honest.

Knowing that Twitter users know had a sense of the power of the community, instead of just tweeting outrage at the comments, Twitter users started to encourage each other to petition the companies which advertised on the Daily Mail website instead. Although I am sure that Twitter will never get official recognition for the role that it played, surely it is too much of a coincidence that within just a matter of hours every single advert had vanished from the page carrying the column in question.

What’s more, the Press Complaints Commission received more than one thousand complaints about the column. Again, this was at least partly due to people on Twitter pointing others in the right direction. When the PCC website crumbled under the strain, it was Twitter telling folk where complaints could be emailed instead.

Until now, it had been pretty easy for people to dismiss Twitter as nothing more than a geek messageboard. As The Powers That Be in the US are discovering those days are over, Twitter has found its voice.