cyber crime

Along with being home to Silicon Valley, California is also an epicenter of cybercrime.

That led California Attorney General Kamala Harris to announce today the creation of a new state Justice Department unit to combat crimes that enlist technology.

The eCrime unit aims to "make sure that vulnerable populations are safe, that consumers are safe, and that we allow good behavior to occur," Harris said at a news conference in San Jose, Calif (see video of news conference below). "But where there are predators and predatory practices, we want to ensure we have the skills and technology … Read more

A new free tool from the makers of Norton attempts to quantify the real-time state of cybersecurity. It makes its debut today alongside the latest version of Symantec's all-in-one consumer security suite, Norton 360.

The Norton CyberCrime Index lies somewhere between a weather report and the United States' threat level advisory system, and Norton 360 version 5 launches with a direct link to it.

The CyberCrime Index uses a statistical model based on information from Symantec's Global Intelligence Network, ID Analytics, and DataLossDB. At the top level, the CyberCrime Index takes this data and creates a number evaluating … Read more

Many organizations are focused on stopping random hackers and blocking pornography when they should be concerned with bigger threats from professional cybercriminals, according to a new cybersecurity report.

In a survey conducted last year of 523 IT and security managers, top-level executives, and law enforcement personnel, hackers were rated the biggest threat, followed by insiders and foreign entities--probably because hackers are the "noisiest and easiest to detect," the 2010 CyberSecurity Watch Survey concluded.

However, attackers from nation-states and organized crime syndicates use more sophisticated techniques that can do more economic damage and go undiscovered, said the report, sponsored … Read more

In September 2008 police began arresting alleged members of Dark Market, an underground Internet forum for buying and selling credit card data used for identity fraud. The sting wouldn't have been possible without the work of FBI agent J. Keith Mularski who spent two years infiltrating the group.

Mularski became hacker "Master Splynter," a play on the name of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle character called "Master Splinter," a rat who lives in New York City's sewers. He was so successful in his online disguise that he ended up running the server that hosted … Read more

Every time I use my credit card online I suffer a momentary feeling of angst, even though I know that it's still safer than handing my card over to an unscrupulous waiter. The impersonal nature of the Internet and the perception that I lose control of my data after I hit "submit" contributes to this lack of sense of security.

Also contributing to this paranoid feeling are all the reports of phishing scams, including IRS and tax-related scams; data breaches at retailers like TJX, where more than 45 million accounts were exposed; and payment processors like RBS WorldPay, … Read more

Today's title is an example from Natali's mind of some tags you might put on a video with Yahoo's new video tagging game. I would like to see that video. We also touch on the myth of Cyber Monday and keep you up to date on Linux on the iPhone.

Cyber Monday supposed to be big this year http://www.pcworld.com/article/154458/a_cyber_monday_tech_shopping_primer.html http://news.cnet.com/8301-13845_3-10110111-58.html

Joost for iPhone http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10109753-2.html

Yahoo Video Tag game http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/yahoos_new_videotaggame_lets_you_tag_within_videos.php… Read more